Well it seems our good Charles Marshall has contradicted himself. He is quoted as having said one thing in a debate, and we’ve got him saying another rather obviously contradictory thing in writing about Meyer’s scholarship when it comes to the fossil record of the relationship between the cambrian and precambrian. So which one is it?
I some times get the impression some people who engage with ID proponents are going too far out of their way to be nice and courteous to creationists and ID proponents, to a degree that it seems fake.
We all know how tone-obsessed Christian fundamentalists are (and that this in itself is a rhetorical strategy), so I suspect there are people who basically try to play in to that by throwing praise of some sort on to them even if not deserved to try to score points with a pro-ID audience.
They’re not doing themselves any favors as that same misplaced praise is then invoked as constituting a kind of validation of their ideas by ID proponents, as that whole article by Casey Luskin obviously is intended to do.
Exactly. Whenever I have made an oral presentation and the person evaluating starts his critique with some words of praise like “What I liked about your presentation was…” my heart immediately sinks because I know he is just trying to soften the blow for the withering criticism that is to follow. I bet most people know this.
Those engaging with ID’er must understand that ID’ers can NEVER be trusted to be honest. They will take any opportunity to misquote, twist or take your words out of context to make it appear you endorse their position. Meyer did that in the epic quote mine described above, and @Giltil has just done it here before our very eyes.
And somehow none of the IDcreationist gurus, even Axe himself, cite Axe, Foster, & Ferscht 1996, which used barnase and assayed activity in a better way. One doesn’t even have to go beyond the title:
… the development of novel enzymes, either by design or by natural or experimental evolution. To test the minimum requirements for a core to provide sufficient structural integrity for enzymatic activity, we have produced mutants of the ribonuclease barnase in which 12 of the 13 core residues have together been randomly replaced by hydrophobic alternatives. Using a sensitive biological screen, we find that a strikingly high proportion of these mutants (23%) retain enzymatic activity in vivo. Further substitution at the 13th core position shows that a similar proportion of completely random hydrophobic cores supports enzyme function. Of the active mutants produced, several have no wild-type core residues. These results imply that hydrophobicity is nearly a sufficient criterion for the construction of a functional core and, in conjunction with previous studies, that refinement of a crudely functional core entails more stringent sequence constraints than does the initial attainment of crude core function. Since attainment of crude function is the critical initial step in evolutionary innovation, the relatively scant requirements contributed by the hydrophobic core would greatly reduce the initial hurdle on the evolutionary pathway to novel enzymes. Similarly, experimental development of novel functional proteins might be simplified by limiting core design to mere specification of hydrophobicity and using iterative mutation-selection to optimize core structure.
Oops. Better pick an different enzyme and an amazingly INsensitive assay…
I understand but I don’t think this is clear as common descent implies more then the way it is used by you. @djkriese are you clear with Johns explanation? Are your students?
The genetic differences between species can in fact be explained by accumulation of mutations from a common ancestor. The various types of mutations have all been empirically observed. Hence the mechanism has in fact been empirically shown to explain the differences.
One need only look at the sequences, infer a tree, and then use one’s brain to figure out what those mutational histories would have to look like. Where the sequences differ is where mutations occurred.
If species A has AAAATTTAA and species B has AAGATTTAA then there was an A<->G transition in either A or B. And a rooted phylogeny with more species could be used to infer which is the ancestral state. Simple principle that can basically applied to any observed difference. Be those duplications, insertions, deletions etc.
There’s your ID hypothesis predicting again. If you disagree, name a single enzyme that you know (not guess) has a unique substrate. You were spectacularly wrong about beta-lactamase.
And as for neutral mutations, how do you explain these data?
This is all fine but if your statement is possibly true you have only explained one the observed differences. You have a partial explanation yet you are claiming a complete explanation.
If organism A has genes ABC and organism B has genes DEF mere sequence comparison does not explain this difference so your statement does not explain the genetic difference at the gene level. A similar problem exists for chromosomes.
Since the other thread was locked, let’s continue pruning orders of magnitude from your math.
For the moment, take my word on the lower range of Lynch’s range of rates being the correct one, and that the mouse generation time should be used instead of human. That knocks 4 orders of magnitude off by your math. What happens when you divide the time since MRCA of human and mouse by that figure? Is it close to the number that you want explained?
Mere sequence comparison is not supposed to explain the difference and nobody said it does. It is mutations of all their sorts that explain sequence differences. So if one species has sequence not observed in another(whether protein coding or not), those are also explained as either originating by mutation, or independent deletions. It might be divergence of duplicate genes, or divergence of non-coding DNA or what have you, or independent pseudogenizations by mutation in both A and B.
I will just add that, as far as I can recall, those derailments usually occurred because a creationist/ID proponent refused to engage with the scientific evidence in good faith. I have no reason to expect that will happen here, so everything should be fine.
IMHO, your sanity will be best served by treating @Rope as a capable adult and just letting people post their comments in the main thread for him to read and respond to, rather than treating him like a little child who can’t tolerate any comments that might be too upsetting.
It’ll save you a lot of work if nothing else. If the comments in this thread are any indication of what will be deemed unacceptable, you are going to have a lot of work to do.