Bob O'H
Posts: 2564
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Dave waves his arms a bit | Quote |
Bob
It said nothing about the range of possible amino acid sequences that could accomplish this task.
Correct. We also don’t how many possible different combinations of the atoms in a space shuttle will carry passengers to space and back. We know from experience that most of them will not as it’s a lot harder finding arrangements that meet the specification versus finding arrangements that don’t meet it. A moron can build a space shuttle that doesn’t work. It took hundreds of man years of effort from very bright engineers to build one that does.
A physicist can explain to you precisely why most combinations of matter won’t fly to space and back but most people have a well enough developed sense of intuition to know this without invoking statistical mechanics.
I think we know from experience that the vast majority of combinations of amino acids won’t meet the specification of energy storage. ATP synthase is highly conserved in all forms of life. This is indicative that even small changes in sequence result in something that doesn’t fit the specification. If small random changes result in catastrophic failure that’s pretty compelling evidence that very few of all the possible polymer sequences meet the specification.
I suppose this could be better characterized by replacing the genes that specify the protein components in ATP synthase with random strings of codons and see how many of the random sequences still result in a working ATP synthase molecule. What I don’t suppose is anyone will bother doing it because the result is almost certain - no amount of effort will find a randomly generated sequence that works.
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Dave - surely you realised what would happen when you said you'd calculate CSI. I'm surprised you went down this path.
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It is fun to dip into the various threads to watch cluelessness at work in the hands of the confident exponent. - Soapy Sam (so say we all)
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