sledgehammer
Posts: 533
Joined: Sep. 2008
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| Quote (midwifetoad @ Mar. 01 2011,05:28) | | "Islands of functionality" is one of those great metaphors being slowly strangled by facts. |
I see the bio-functional protein space as a hierarchical tree, where the trunk and major limbs are made up of the original polypeptide chains, the limbs and branches are the longer proteins, and the modern 100-300 aa proteins are the twigs way out at the periphery.
The IDers, like Axe, Durston and Behe see only a horizontal, 2-dimensional slice through the tree. To them, it looks like the functional "islands" made up of the twigs and branches are very sparse and not connected to each other. The total area occupied by the twig's cross sections appears to be infinitesimal relative to the blank space between them. Sort of like how a "Flatland" denizen would regard a complex 3-dimensional object.
When the entire functional protein space is observed from a higher-dimensional perspective, it is easily seen that all the twigs are interconnected by the tree structure, and the "isolated islands of functionality " perspective is shown to be narrow and myopic at best.
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The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny is alleviated by their lack of consistency. -A. Einstein (H/T, JAD)
If evolution is true, you could not know that it's true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. ?Think about that. -K. Hovind
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