Just half a year ago, Brian Miller posted an article at EN in which he tried to argue that cooption scenarios can’t explain irreducible complexity. He cites Chatterjee et al (2014) in support of his claim that “the chance of any novel protein much longer than 250 amino acids appearing would be miniscule.”
I find this extremely ironic since the authors of that paper explicitly state the following:
[E]volution can be seen as a tinkerer playing around with small modifications of existing sequences rather than creating entirely new ones […] Our process can also explain the emergence of orphan genes arising from non-coding regions [45].
Doesn’t Miller think that something like that is impossible?