True, they are conserved proteins that have been protected by purifying selection for a very long time. That doesn’t tell you how they originated, it just tells you their rate of divergence is lower than expected by a model in which all mutations that occur to the locus are assumed to be neutral.
Idiot.
Exactly. How do you propose they share a common ancestor given the magnitude of changes and the chance of deleterious mutations along the way?
What does that high level of conservation tell you about the numerator of a protein with 20^371 possible arrangements?
Then there should be a model explaining these changes. Where is it?
Rare relative to neutral or deleterious mutations. The other issue with the theory is a beneficial mutation is different than a new function enabling mutation which can require multiple coordinated mutations.
This was from a rapid internet search and I was simply identifying the source which apparently was a UNC website. A real argument would make a counter claim based on alternative sources. Do you have a counter claim that will change the substance of the argument?
Hi Ron
By clustered I take it to mean a few mutations away from each other. What do you think it means?
If it is not a few mutations away from each other then this case is the opposite of clustered.
This is just you admitting you don’t understand selection. Embarrassing.
Got it but this model based on.realistic assumptions of finding the same basic function with a drastically different sequence counts on statistical miracles. Neutral mutations are not a realistic assumption.
Hi Troll
Hi Uneducated Buffoon.
You’re meant to be showing that can’t have happened. But given the time available and a selective element as well why shouldn’t they have got as different as they have.
Nothing. It tells us that what that protein does is very sensitive to the sequence. That doesn’t mean that other equally long proteins will have the same constraints at all.
Depends on what you mean by “explain”. Gene gain (mainly but not solely through duplication) and loss explains that there will be differences. But the actual differences will depend both on the details and historical contingencies.
The first point is irrelevant. The second is an assumption.
The point is that the numbers are from a highly biased - and old - source with no authority. Therefore there is no reason to trust them. The assertion that you are too lazy and too ignorant to identify the source does not add to its credibility or yours. And the fact that the falsehood was both obvious and convenient to you does nothing to dispel the idea that it was intentional dishonesty. Especially in the absence of a link which would show that it was not an official UNC page, simply a blog written by a Computer Science professor at UNC.
50% of residue substituting mutations are deleterious. How would the protein vary this much and avoid it losing all its original function?
Then you are claiming residue substations are neutral? How do you reconcile 1000 changes on one hand and 0 on another given hundreds of millions of generations.
We have reviewed these models and the maximum number of functional changes is 6 in any model.
How is the first irrelevant? The second is based on empirical data.
Again you have made no attempt at correcting the numbers. A theory should be based on claims that have a high probability being true such as greater than 95%.
Evolutionary theory is based on statistical miracles such as a protein starting from function A and landing on function A’ greater than a thousand mutations away. Biology is filled with these examples.
Are you at all skeptical of Universal Common Descent?
No, it doesn’t. It’s just drifting apart extremely slowly. Nothing about finding the same function twice.
You’re being an idiot again.
You mean the assumption of neutrality for all mutations implies a way too high rate of divergence (if they were all neutral the different genes would have diverged much more), so instead the actual proportion of mutations that occurred that were neutral would have to be much lower than all. By a factor of at least one thousand.
But that only shows that neutrality is more than sufficient to explain how much they have diverged. It’s not that neutrality is not enough to explain how they can have diverged so much, it’s actually too much. So the majority of mutations since they first began diverging were probably deleterious. So it’s not hard to explain their divergence at all, it’s easy.
At half of mutations being deleterious, it’s drift at half the rate of mutations. That would imply(extrapolating my calculation above) a divergence of roughly 13 million total mutations over 1.6 billion years. Obviously the genes aren’t big enough (well they are, but then saturation would have erased any similarity above that expected by chance, so they’d be ~5% similar in sequence at best), being only about 6000 basepairs for each copy, so in fact there’s no problem with how much they have diverged.
The amount of time since their divergence is enough for thirteen thousand times more differences than actually observed. Hence the genes are highly conserved due to purifying selection. They have been strongly maintained by selection against deleterious mutations, that’s how they “managed to avoid losing function.”
Bill notice how the genes ARE about 50% identical, and yet still function. So if they can function while being 50% similar, why could they not function while being more similar? 51% 52% 53%? Why would them being more similar make them less likely to be nonfunctional? Play the divergence in reverse. Run time backwards, and they converge. If they are functional now at 50% similar, why would their convergence imply a loss of function sometime along the way? It wouldn’t, obviously.
How are you so dumb you need this explained to you again for the fiftieth time? I’ve given you this explanation before literally like fifty times over the span of about 5 years. That’s still the answer to that same stupid question.
Not so much. 
If I had said “It was published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism, therefore it is wrong” then I would have committed the genetic fallacy. But I didn’t.
An article published in PotICC could be right, just like the claim of a crazed street-preacher that the world will end tomorrow could be right. It’s just that we have no good a priori reason to accept that either is correct.
My point was rather to impeach an implicit Argument from False Authority. PotICC is not “a recognised peer-reviewed source”, therefore it does not bestow any legitimacy on anything published in it.
Nor for that matter is John Sanford, AFAIK, a recognised expert in Population Genetics.
Therefore your claim of validation seems to devolve into one of “Sanford says it, I believe it, that settles it.”
Selection culling the deleterious variations of course.
I’m claiming that there will not be any strong correlation between protein length and conservation.
Obvious nonsense.
Shouldn’t you be explaining why it is relevant? And I really doubt that the second is true in any way that poses a threat to evolutionary theory.
What? You are the one supposedly trying to show that you are right. It is for you to support your claims. The burden of proof does not shift to me because you are lazy and incompetent. And any theory has to accept that unlikely events can happen because they do.
Bill Cole says that it is a ”statistical miracle” does not in any way show that it is. Evolutionary mechanisms greatly affect the probabilities. Until you take them into account - and your continued refusal to admit the role of selection proves that you do not - all you have is a biased and willfully ignorant opinion. Which you expect to be taken as a fact.
The problems at the root of the tree are well known. Anything beyond that is supported by science. It is for creationists and IDists to do better if they want to change that.
You’re a good educational resource for after having illustrated the genetic fallacy, you know offer a good example of sophistry.
The only reason John Sanford is not recognize as an expert in population genetics by mainstream scientist is that he is a creationist. IOW, an other example of the genetic fallacy.
“The only reason Bob Knodel is not recognize (sic) as an expert in astronomy by mainstream scientist (sic) is that he is a flat-earther. IOW, another example of the genetic fallacy.”
If 50% of residue substituting mutations are deleterious, that means 50% aren’t. Those 50% would affect at least half the amino-acids in a protein. So a protein could have at least half of it’s amino-acids changed without losing it’s original function. Half of 2000 is 1000.[1] So a protein of 2000 amino-acids could have at least 1000 of its amino-acids changed without loss of function.
What’s the problem?
Included for Bill. ↩︎
Is that he has no understanding of population genetics.
In Bill’s delusional reality full of ghosts and literal supernatural miracles (never mind “statistical” miracles), a protein cannot accumulate more than 6 mutations in the entire history of life.
Meanwhile in actual reality, here are 32 mutations in the spike protein of SARS-Cov2 when the Omicron variant was first sequenced(it’s got even more now) that happened in the span of about a year or so:
Which Bill has been told before. So he knows it. What do we call someone who knowingly says a falsehood, @colewd?
What is fixed in the population Delta or Omicrom. Do you understand the difference between variation in a population and fixation?
Do you understand viruses are not bacteria and bacteria are not multicellular organisms. You should be smarter than this. You need to pick your battles and get rid of the losers.
