“The reason a bike lock works,” explains Meyer, “is that there are vastly more ways of arranging those numeric characters that will keep the lock closed than there are that will open the lock.”
Most bicycle locks have four dials with ten digits. So for a thief to steal the bike, he would have to guess correctly from among 10,000 possible combinations. No easy task.
But what about DNA? Well, in experiments Axe conducted at Cambridge, he found that for a DNA sequence generating a short protein just 150 amino acids in length, for every 1 workable arrangement of amino acids, there are 10 to the 77th possible unworkable amino acid arrangements. Using the bicycle lock analogy, that’s a lock with 77 dials containing 10 digits.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/10/eric_metaxas_on_1100261.html
I believe this is what Mung has been talking about. I asked Mung:
How many goes do you get? How many bacteria in the earth’s soil?
Mung replies:
Not nearly enough.
I feel this is interesting enough for an OP as it seems to finally touch upon what IDers think the designer actually does that can be investigated scientifically.
For example, if we find in a population a protein that is different to the version in an ancestral population but which still works, the by (their) definition, that is prima facie evidence of the designer at work.
Perhaps we can then take the population with the original protein, enclose it in our most sensitive equipment and attempt to detect the designers actions when it “solves the bike lock” and finds the new protein and somehow makes the required adjustment?
If I were an ID supporter these are exactly the sorts of experiments I’d be proposing, and with money on the table (Templeton) I continue to be surprised at the lack of such endeavours. At the very least they can rule out some levels of possible designer interaction at the macroscopic level.
And Mung, I’d be interested in knowing how many would be enough?
Earlier during his direct testimony, Behe had argued that a computer simulation of evolution he performed with Snoke shows that evolution is not likely to produce certain complex biochemical systems. Under cross examination however, Behe was forced to agree that “the number of prokaryotes in 1 ton of soil are 7 orders of magnitude higher than the population [it would take] to produce the disulfide bond” and that “it’s entirely possible that something that couldn’t be produced in the lab in two years… could be produced over three and half billion years.”
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day12am.html
I forgot to put the page break in the OP and can’t edit it now 🙁
We need instruments to detect tiny DNA-sized poofs.
If the poofs typically coincide with favorable changes in the DNA, that’s probably the Designer’s work. Then the challenge is to find what or who is doing the poofing.
At least it’s more science of design than anything any IDist has done so far.
Glen Davidson
Well, this is it. The way some IDers talk evolution is impotent to perform even the most trivial of change and therefore there are that many more opportunities to catch the designer in the act, as it were.
And yet, the more the designer does the less possible it seems to see it in action. Quite the puzzle!
It’s almost like how there is still no clear cut evidence of ghosts despite the proliferation of camera phones. It’s almost as if the underlying premise was itself faulty….
But we’ll see. I look forwards to the excuses of the IDers as to why what I’m proposing here is simply wrong.
Before I pay attention to any ID arguments regarding protein evolution, I’d like to see them summarize the latest research supporting the evolution of new proteins.
If they can do that, I’ll read their counter argument.
If I am designing a bike, I don’t need 10,000 tries. One try is sufficient.
If I am stealing a bike, I don’t need 10,000 tries either, because I don’t have to steal a specific bike. I just have to find one that I manage to break. And maybe I can do it with acid or bolt cutters, or slipping the chain off the post because the bike owner did a poor job of locking it.
It’s a bit like Apple and the FBI. If they had 10,000 identical iPhones they could open the 4 digit code in one round.
And it still blows me away they are still talking about “10 to the 77th possible unworkable amino acid arrangements” when nothing like that is actually “searched” in each round. It’s why I always ask them to be specific about which biological process is doing this “searching”.
This OP continues a discussion from another thread and is related to the Krauss/Meyer/Lamoureux debate in which Stephen Meyer employed an analogy of a bicycle lock when speaking about the difficulty of evolutionary search.
The answer to the question of “how many bacteria” was both answered during the debate and in another link I provided in the Torley Eviscerates Krauss thread.
Here again:
And this is before natural selection can play any role, which is why it is a random search. To answer this with “but evolution is not random,” is to misrepresent or misinterpret the argument.
This is just silly. I would be impressed if you could provide evidence that either Meyer or Axe has ever made such a claim.
I wonder why bike thieves don’t get together to coordinate their theft attempts. Surely 1000 bike thieves trying to steal 1000 bikes all at once, one of them will get lucky enough trying to open one of the 1000 bike locks.
Then why is the size of the space relevant?
Well, there we have it. If the number of possible sequences that need to be searched is impossibly high, the designer must be acting there. And that’s where scientific efforts to investigate the designer are presumably happening.
Mung, you only search the sequences that are one mutation away from the existing sequence.
Always.
In the DI page I l link to they also say
What is happening in the “random mutational search” that makes it almost impossible that it would produce even one new functional protein in the entire history of life on earth? It sure sounds like it’s trying each option to me, randomly or otherwise. Otherwise, what’s taking so long?
If you want to argue instead about who make what specific claim, the quotes here are from Eric Metaxas of the DI as per the link in the OP and I don’t at this time have specific positions for either Axe or Meyer I can reference for you. But I may look.
Yes, it is silly. So presumably there is some other explanation as to what random mutational search means in that article? Right? If so, what is that, because I don’t know?
If it’s just a strawman where Eric is using Axe’s work to say that given this big Number then finding a specific number in that range is going to be near impossible, can we perhaps agree on that? As we’ve both said that’s silly, as nobody actually makes that claim.
Right?
OMagain: And it still blows me away they are still talking about “10 to the 77th possible unworkable amino acid arrangements” when nothing like that is actually “searched” in each round.
Mung: This is just silly. I would be impressed if you could provide evidence that either Meyer or Axe has ever made such a claim.
See that bolded section? That’s the claim I am talking about.
Neither Axe nor Meyer make that claim. So why did you bring it up?
So? How does that alter the probability involved? If all that’s going on is a local search it seems even more unlikely.
Yes, I know. And I’ve said what I’ve said.
What’s the word “unworkable” doing there? This is why the lock/combination analogy is so inappropriate. We certainly don’t know what untried proteins possess in the way of functionality. The lock analogy relies on there being only one possible solution. There may be many undiscovered solutions among all theoretically possible but untried solutions.
What, that the entirety of protein space is not searched anew each time?
I bring it up because it’s part of the overall strategy. Axe does some research. Someone else at the DI makes claims regarding that research.
I bring it up because looking for more information on what you posted that was IIRC the very first link that appeared. And what’s on the very first link, a strawman. And the people creating that strawman, you give them money.
How many small, one step changes do there have to be before you’ll class something as new?
I’m officially changing/extending the topic of the OP to include the way the DI use Axe’s work in their publicity claims, as per the link in the OP.
To stand in contrast to “workable.” The alternative to “unworkable.”
🙂
Functional vs. Non-Functional.
Selectable vs. Non-Selectable
Happy Mutation vs. Sad Mutation
etc.
It depends. In a random search there’s nothing preventing the same sequence from being “tried” over and over. Like a bike thief who has no memory of the sequences she already tried. Agreed?
Mung,
Yes but until a protein has been synthesized, how do you know if it is functional or not?
That actually happens in weasel. Doesn’t prevent changes from accumulating.
Most populations, including humans, can test every one step mutation within a few generations.
So? How does that alter the probability involved?
How long do you suppose it would take to synthesize every possible protein? Surely science can progress without having to resort to brute force approaches to addressing intractable problems.
Can someone say Mung was correct?
The one in 10^77 figure is not for a specific target, which is what I said in the original Torley/Krauss thread.
An incredibly long time.
That isn’t the point I was making. An argument based on the claim that unknown proteins are non-functional is unsupported. Unsearched sequence space may be rich in novel functional proteins. Evolutionary search only needs to stumble across something that is useful; exhaustive search is a red herring.
The probability of what?
Well, I would only count a step away as change.
E.G. If you start from
XXX
and get
XYX
Then go back to
XXX
If we’re measuring “change from XXX” then I’d class that as no change.
But my question rather is about how far apart do two proteins have to be before you will call them different enough to be both individually designed as they were impossible to evolve?
But to acknowledge your point, yes, trying the same thing over and over as you have no memory can mean the space is ever larger then it seems at first.
We are permitted to make inferences in science and to use those inferences to support arguments.
Perhaps. AFIAK the only people who believe that to actually be the case are anti-ID “skeptics” posting on internet blogs. 🙂
The probability of “something useful” in this discussion is 1 in 10^77. Until you actually find that “something useful” the only means to find it is random search.
I thought you wanted to talk about the link in your OP. I assume you actually read it.
I’m finding it best to ensure I know all the variable values as I go along with you.
So shall we agree that I’m taking about
?
And given that I’m asking what is actually happening when this “lock” is being turned?
What thing, that happens in biology, is happening there?
The problem seems to lie with the wording of this claim:
I think it should be reworded slightly, to read:
For every KNOWN workable arrangement of amino acids, there are 10 to the 77th UNKNOWN potentially workable arrangements. Potentially, ALL of them are workable in some currently unknown way.
The rigid presumption that unknown=unworkable is certainly debatable.
In Response to Meyer-Dawkins Dispute, Misconceptions About My Research Resurface
This seems reasonable. Mutations result in a constant infusion of tiny changes, most of them functionally neutral. So the question seems to be, does each of these tiny changes result in a “brand new protein”? If he’s right that there are at least thousands of them, this would imply that the set of all workable variations could be very large.
I’ve never paid much attention to Axe. Now I see that he’s a riot. Another fast-talking Liar for God. All he has to do is to sound good to folks like Mung.
Well over a thousand!? Laughing my ass off. Really. Relative to the other numbers Axe invokes, the number of distinct protein folds is minuscule.
It truly is funny that I would say that not many folds have emerged by biological evolution, and Axe would turn “not many have emerged” into into a small target for which evolution must have “searched.” (There is nothing more pathetic than someone whose god lives only in gaps.)
Evolutionary processes do not search — not even in the computational applications that interest me. (The moral of the No Free Lunch theorem is, more or less, that search, if any, is on the part of the practitioner who selects an algorithm for sampling a space of alternatives.) To argue that biological evolution was searching for whatever has happened to emerge is to parade the most embarrassing of tautologies.
Douglas Axe:
Based on your publications page you have rather a lot to say about searches, including the following:
That’s probably Joe writing though rather than Tom.
All that talk of search and find and targets and evolution and spaces…
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2015/03/fitness-surface.html
Mung,
I can and do read. Axe certainly didn’t let go of the term search, did he? And he certainly didn’t let go of the notion that evolution had to find a small set of configurations — the configurations that we know have emerged.
Axe truly is a silly man. I genuinely laughed out loud at his contention that his challenge to “Darwinian evolution” must have been support for ID. Hasn’t he gotten word that the “dual model” fallacy has been smacked down (at least) three times now in the federal courts? No matter how conservative a judge ID draws, when it next goes to court, it is going to lose on the false dichotomy of ID and “Darwinian evolution” (whatever that is).
Mung,
Abstract—The objective is to predict on the basis of recent observations the behavior of a nonlinear dynamical system. An evolutionary algorithm searches a large space of model topologies and precision hyperparameters, fitting limited-precision models to older observations and assessing how well the models generalize to more recent observations.
Is that paper 1995 or 1996? I’m in the habit of thinking — a lot. I challenge my own beliefs. I discover errors. I change. Hopefully I grow better.
Never, ever have I been in the business of writing scripture, or claiming to know exactly how to read scripture.
You’ve seen me write here at TSZ on how I got the NFL math right, but the exposition of it wrong. I understand things just a wee bit better, a couple decades after, than I did at the time. So why are you playing gotcha with me? Note that we can substitute the word samples for searches in the quote above, and it works just fine. Better, in fact.
I think people who make a big deal of saying that they’re saying what they’ve always been saying are dopes or cons (or both).
Yup. I crossed over the 10-percent-contribution threshold that Joe has for coauthors. It’s mostly his post. And mostly a brilliant one. That doesn’t mean that I agree with him on absolutely everything. We’re not part of a sociopolitical movement, you know. Or do you know?
The work done by natural selection is R and D, so biology is fundamentally akin to engineering, a conclusion that has been deeply resisted out of misplaced fear for what it might imply.
– Daniel Dennett
Mung,
Here is Art Hunts counter to Doug Axes paper where he claims a range of the probability of protein folds of 10^10 to 10^64 for 100aa protein. Why do think there is a range. My understanding is it depends on the function of the protein. I think that 10^10 is based on the ability to bind ATP. The sequence dependence for proteins is the one of the biggest challenges to MET IMHO http://aghunt.wordpress.com/
Good reading, Mung. Now keep reading that same post of ours, all the way to the last section which is entitled “Is evolution a search?”. Where we conclude that “It is generally not best to regard evolutionary processes as carrying out a search for a target which is an optimal organism.” And explains why.
One might also wonder why, if evolution is not best thought of as a search, we were bothering with our “GUC Bug” and asking about how probable it was that it would find the target. The answer is simple: we were critiquing Dembski, Ewert, and Marks’s paper, which presented some theorems on how well the average search would do, argued that it would do no better than random choice of a result, and argued that this applied to “evolutionary search” and showed that evolution could do no better than blind search.
Mung,
Did you read the rest of the book? Did you find anything else in it persuasive?
Actually, Axe made the claim. Here:
Evolution vs. Functional Proteins – Doug Axe – Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4FvdOxIDfU
Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds: Doug Axe:
Excerpt: Combined with the estimated prevalence of plausible hydropathic patterns (for any fold) and of relevant folds for particular functions, this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10^77,
No he didn’t.
This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.
No mention of anything like that actually being “searched” in each round.