Author Archives: Allan Miller

Protein Space and Hoyle’s Fallacy – a response to vjtorley

Posted on by
17

‘vjtorley’ has honoured me with my very own OP at Uncommon Descent in response to my piece on Protein Space. I cannot, of course, respond over there (being so darned uncivil and all!), so I will put my response in this here bottle and hope that a favourable wind will drive it to vjt’s shores. It’s a bit long (and I’m sure not any the better for it…but I’m responding to vjt and his several sources … ! ;)).

“Build me a protein – no guidance allowed!”

The title is an apparent demand for a ‘proof of concept’, but it is beyond intelligence too at the moment, despite a working system we can reverse engineer (a luxury not available to Ye Olde Designer). Of course I haven’t solved the problem, which is why I haven’t dusted off a space on my piano for that Nobel Prize. But endless repetition of Hoyle’s Fallacy from multiple sources does not stop it being a fallacious argument.

Dr Torley bookends his post with a bit of misdirection. We get pictures of, respectively, a modern protein and a modern ribozyme. It has never been disputed that modern proteins and ribozymes are complex, and almost certainly not achievable in a single step. But

1) Is modern complexity relevant to abiogenesis?

2) Is modern complexity relevant to evolution?

Here are three more complex objects:

DESCRIPTION HERE

Circuit Board

DESCRIPTION HERE

Panda playing the flute

DESCRIPTION HERE

er … not yet in service!

 

Continue reading →

Journal club – Protein Space. Big, isn’t it?

Posted on by
161

Simplistic combinatorial analyses are an honoured tradition in anti-evolutionary circles. Hoyle’s is the archetype of the combinatorial approach, and he gets a whole fallacy named after him for his trouble. The approach will be familiar – a string of length n composed of v different kinds of subunit is one point in a permutation space containing vn points in total. The chance of hitting any given sequence in one step, such as the one you have selected as ‘target’, is the reciprocal of that number. Exponentiation being the powerful tool it is, it takes only a little work with a calculator to assess the permutations available to the biological polymers DNA and protein and come up with some implausibly large numbers and conclude that Life – and, if you are feeling bold, evolution – is impossible.

Dryden, Thomson and White of Edinburgh University’s Chemistry department argue in this 2008 paper that not only is the combinatorial space of the canonical 20 L-acids much smaller than simplistically assumed, but more surprisingly, that it is sufficiently small to have been explored completely during the history of life on earth. Continue reading →

Robert Byers’s views on evolution

Posted on by
102

Canadian YEC Robert will be familiar to many from various evolution/anti-evolution blogs. He showed up in my ‘macro/microevolution’ thread, and I am creating this as a thread for Robert to air his views and for those who choose to engage with him to do so. I am moving certain posts here from macro/micro, as they are off-topic for that thread.

Macro/microevolution

Posted on by
94

A number of posts have appeared at Uncommon Descent on the topic of macroevolution. Comments here have been appended to other threads, but I thought it an appropriate subject for its own thread.

The posts start here with a link to chemist James M Tour’s blog, on which he posted some personal musings on the creation-evolution debate. Numerous follow-on posts have appeared on UD subsequently, in a rather recursive comments-becoming-posts-spawning-more-comments-that-become-posts manner. I won’t detail them all, but they comprise the bulk of UD threads between 18th and 22nd February.

Tour admits his lack of credentials in the subject, but fundamentally expresses doubts that microevolution (which he accepts) leads to macroevolution. The issue has taken a bizarre turn since, apparently, a couple of UD regulars have offered to stump up costs for Nick Matzke to have lunch with Tour in a meeting that will be witnessed by one of them (it’s his dollar!) but, at Tour’s request, will not be recorded or discussed externally. A personal tutorial. Matzke’s mission, should he choose to accept it, is to prove to Tour’s satisfaction that the extrapolation is justified – that macroevolution is sufficiently explained by iterating the small degrees of microevolution.

Continue reading →