Swapping Iron For Magnesium in the Ribosome

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@pnelson

I realize this looks rigged and cheesy, but a serious and statistically rigorous version of the same kind of test could be conducted with evolutionary biologists.

We already did this here @pnelson, avoiding the selection bias in your experiment: A Test of Common Descent vs. Common Function. When do you want to see how phylogenomics systematically tests this?

Better yet, it avoids htis problem:

@pnelson

Systematic biologists, however, would probably refuse to participate, because they know about confounding patterns such as non-orthologous gene displacement, trait reversal, rampant homoplasy, long-branch attraction, parallelism, and the like.

Instead, we would use the brute facts to guide a test of the hypothesis.