Joe G
Posts: 12011
Joined: July 2007
|
| Quote (Occam's Aftershave @ Jan. 17 2019,18:24) | | Quote (Joe G @ Jan. 17 2019,18:16) | | Quote | | Behe’s claims about IC have already been disproven. See the work of molecular biologist Joe Thornton in resurrecting ancient proteins. IC structures have been empirically shown to evolve through indirect pathways, using co-option and molecular scaffolding. Thornton’s work caused Behe to now claim IC systems can’t evolve through direct Darwinian pathways which is a pretty lame claim since they still evolve. |
As Dr Behe said:
The study by Bridgham et al (2006) published in the April 7 issue of Science is the lamest attempt yet and perhaps the lamest attempt thats even possible to deflect the problem that irreducible complexity poses for Darwinism.
| Quote | 1) This continues the venerable Darwinian tradition of making grandiose claims based on piddling results. There is nothing in the paper that an ID proponent would think was beyond random mutation and natural selection. In other words, it is a straw man.
2) The authors (including Christoph Adami in his commentary) are conveniently defining irreducible complexity way, way down. I certainly would not classify their system as anywhere near IC. The IC systems I discussed in Darwins Black Box contain multiple, active protein factors. Their system, on the other hand, consists of just a single protein and its ligand. Although in nature the receptor and ligand are part of a larger system that does have a biological function, the piece of that larger system they pick out does not do anything by itself. In other words, the isolated components they work on are not irreducibly complex.
3) In the experiment just two amino acid residues were changed! No new components were added, no old components were taken away.
4) Nothing new was produced in the experiment; rather, the pre-existing ability of the protein to bind several molecules was simply weakened. The workers begin their experiments with a protein that can strongly bind several, structurally-very-similar steroids, and they end with a protein that at best binds some of the steroids ten-fold more weakly. (Figure 4C)
5) Such results are not different from the development of antibiotic resistance, where single amino acid changes can cause the binding of a toxin to a particular protein to decrease (for example, warfarin resistance in rats, and resistance to various AIDS drugs). Intelligent design proponents happily agree that such tiny changes can be accomplished by random mutation and natural selection.
6) In the least promising intermediate (L111Q) the protein has essentially lost its ability to bind any steroid. In the most promising intermediate protein (the one that has just the S106P alteration) the protein has lost about 99% of its ability to bind DOC and cortisol, and lost about 99.9% of its ability to bind aldosterone. (Figure 4C)
7) Although the authors imply (and Adami claims directly) that the mutated protein is specific for cortisol, in fact it also binds aldosterone with about half of the affinity. (Compare the red and green curves in the lower right hand graph of Figure 4C.) Whats more, there actually is a much larger difference (about thirty-fold) in binding affinity for aldosterone and cortisol with the beginning, ancestral protein than for the final, mutated protein (about two-fold). So the proteins ability to discriminate between the two ligands has decreased by ten-fold.
8) One would think that the hundred-fold decrease in the ability to bind a steroid would at least initially be a very detrimental change that would be weeded out by natural selection. The authors do not test for that; they simply assume it wouldnt be a problem, or that the problem could somehow be easily overcome. Nor do they test their speculation that DOC could somehow act as an intermediate ligand. In other words, in typical Darwinian fashion the authors pass over with their imaginations what in reality would very likely be serious biological difficulties.
9) The fact that such very modest results are ballyhooed owes more, I strongly suspect, to the antipathy that many scientists feel toward ID than to the intrinsic value of the experiment itself.
10) In conclusion, the results (and even the imagined-but-problematic scenario) are well within what an ID proponent already would think Darwinian processes could do, so they wont affect our evaluation of the science. But its nice to know that Science magazine is thinking about us! |
timmy Horton is a pathetic excuse for a human. |
Behe says a lot of really stupid things every time his ID nonsense gets curb stomped by real scientific research. |
You have already admitted that you don't have any real scientific research cuz it's just too expensive.
Loser
--------------
"Facts are Stupid"- Timothy Horton aka Occam's Afterbirth
"Genetic mutations aren't mistakes"-ID and Timothy Horton
Whales do not have tails. Water turns to ice via a molecular code- Acartia bogart, TARD
YEC is more coherent than materialism and it's bastard child, evolutionism
|
