Hey Bill, what’s the chance the folding protein has a biologically useful function? How many would we have to test to find a function. Thousands? Millions? Many orders of magnitude more? Your best estimate please.
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I didn’t realize you were opposed to answering the relevant question instead of the one asked…
In any event…
How often is a completely new enzyme needed? How often do they occur? Most ‘new’ enzymes are co-opted from existing ones, by minor changes to existing sequences… exactly as I described.
Your insistence on diverting away from the way evolution actually works to talk about your ignorant fantasies of how it works is a big part of your problem.
This is false, Behe was wrong. Not just wrong, actively lying about what his sources actually say. What the sources actually say is that the probability of fixing an advantageous substitution prior to fixing a null substitution is relatively low, depending on the relative probability of the two, the selection coefficient of the advantageous allele, and the effective population size. It does not say, imply, or otherwise suggest, that half of the substitutions themselves result in a null allele.
To repeat my earlier comment, Behe is either lying (knowing that his sources don’t say what he says they say), flagrantly incompetent (because he didn’t actually read the sources he was citing, which would still be dishonest), or fairly stupid (since the interpretation of the math is extremely clearly explained in the discussion).
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I did, all of them.
Thanks for the write up. I agree that I have not explained the calculations in enough detail. I also agree with the error you pointed out.
10^482 is an approximation of 20^371. 2^371 is about 4… e^111. I just approximate to 10^111. Subtract 482-111 and you get 10^371. Base two was derived by half of the amino acids being substitutable.
By bad approximation you should mean the approximation can distort the conclusion. Do you think this rounding can change the conclusion?
You are accusing a IVY league educated professor of biochemistry of lying. Is this how academia works now? What university are you going to?
I note you declined to grapple with the presented evidence. Typical.
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I note you will make accusations of dishonesty against a professor and your identify is not known and you will not reveal where you go to school. Why should anyone take you seriously?
Accusations backed by evidence. With which you refuse to engage. Funny, that. It is your pattern to switch to tone when presented evidence, so I’m not surprised.
By the way, the least you could do at this point is admit you were wrong about the null rate. Going to do the minimum, or will you live down to our expectations of you?
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What conclusion? These numbers appear ex-recto. Out of your rear end. The fact that you can’t do simple operations on numbers casts doubts on your ability to correctly reason about what the numbers mean.
On that topic, you’ve been posed a question:
Hey Bill, what’s the chance the folding protein has a biologically useful function? How many would we have to test to find a function. Thousands? Millions? Many orders of magnitude more? Your best estimate please.
He didn’t. He merely mentioned it as one of several possibilities. Of course, if you believe Behe is not lying, that leaves stupidity, incompetence or both as the remaining options. Which do you think is correct?
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I did, actually. Because it’s the least disrespectful possibility. I was giving Behe the benefit of the doubt that he isn’t fairly stupid.
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My mistake, sorry. I guess Bill just doesn’t respect Behe as much as you do.
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And what? You think all Ivy-educated professors are paragons of truth? Clearly you don’t, or else you would have accepted evolution and universal common ancestry already.
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Hi Andrew
I have not seen you call ID supporting professors liars. Have I missed a post where you did?
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I am amused that our ever-credulous Bill thinks that Behe’s four years at UPenn had a greater influence on him than his twenty-odd years in the ethical sewer that is the Disco 'Tute (an organisation whose disregard for the truth would make Joseph Goebbels proud).
For that matter, how many Ivy League grads are in prison for fraud at the moment?
This is, like all Bill’s arguments, utterly ludicrous.
This is simply the equivalent of Bill stating over and over “Behe is wonderful, ID is wonderful, evolution is poopy” in such a loud voice that he is (purposefully) unable to hear any evidence to the contrary. 
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I make the same accusations of dishonesty, Bill. My identity is known. Where does that leave you?
My publications reveal where I went to school. But that doesn’t really matter in the realm of scientific authority, as scientists are judged by their publication records, not by diplomas.
How does my publication record compare to Behe’s? I predict that you lack the courage to look.
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Who is crazier:
- Someone who argues with a salami.
- Someone who argues with salami man over whether salamis can keep up their half of a conversation?
- A salami man arguing with “anti-intelligent salami-ists” with whom he knows will never believe salamis can talk despite being shown a venn diagram clearly showing the overlap between salamis, species that contain meat and species that can vocalize.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein.Feb 23, 2019
Well over 2000 entries in this thread…
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I would point out the rather glaring difference between someone arguing quietly in a corner with a salami, and @colewd’s performative and intrusive sealioning.
As I believe I have pointed out on a number of other threads – analogies make bad arguments.
Anyway, Bill will clearly never answer the question I posed to him. So here’s the real answer: >66%. Scientists created a library of synthetic 4-helix bundle proteins only intending to create proteins with the ability to fold. Surprisingly most of the proteins could perform one or more functions.
In a screen of Heme binding, ~66% of them could bind Heme:
~50% of them showed peroxidase activity, which is also known to be a byproduct of some natural heme-binding proteins (and that activity normally depends on the heme cofactor). This prompted the researchers to test whether the proteins would have activity towards other substrates when not binding heme.
Approximately 30% of the proteins had esterase activity, and 20% showed lipase activity. That’s either the majority, or significant fractions of the proteins exhibiting one or more of three enzymatic reactions, and ligand binding. Further testing showed that about 70% of the proteins could be expressed at high levels in E coli, and about 30% of these high-level expressed proteins had levels of activity above background for all the tested functions.
Now that’s in vitro functions. Would these proteins be able to provide a small handful of specific useful functions to a living organism? Biological functions that aid survival and reproduction, in vivo? They tested 27 different knockout strains of E coli and tested ~1.5 million different mutant proteins for the ability to rescue growth of E coli on minimal medium, in strains that normally was depending on the function of at least one of these knocked-out genes. They found 18 different proteins able to compensate for the lacking functions of four of the knocked out genes.
That’s a probability of approximately 1 in 8.3 × 104, or one in 83 thousand. Not one in 10 to some unfathomable exponent.
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Tim, there are Discourse settings under ‘Preferences’ > ‘Users’ > ‘Ignore User’ so that one can avoid being triggered by the behavior of others. (I speak from personal experience of dealing with being triggered in the past)
Salami man will persist. We have zero power to control what he says or does (unless one can convince an admin to ban the user - unlikely). Our power is to listen or not and to respond or not. I personally find it unproductive to argue with those I think are pathologically bound by an idée fixe and unable to change, but YMMV.
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Yes, and I have used those settings in the past. I do however find that they tend to garble threads, as they not only hide the user’s posts, but also quotes that other users make of those posts.
Add to that, the irritation I feel at our forum’s ‘salami men’ is in rough balance with the amusement I feel at them – with one or other predominating more-or-less at random. Add to this a degree of morbid curiosity at what drives the various forms of talking-to-salamis I observe.
Finally, I would question whether there are any, reasonably active, threads at the moment that offer much higher standard of discourse. Are the defenses of Sanford’s GE, of Midhun’s FDI, or of unified “Gravity, Magnetism, Electricity & Dielectricity” really that much less vacuously ‘salami talk’ than Bill’s defense of Behe’s thoroughly-threadbare honesty?
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