Paul,
The point IS NOT that we have a naturally occuring evolutionary environment
here. No one would deny that we have a highly artificial system! I don't
quite understand why you are pointing that out to us. It's totally obvious.
The point IS, however, that apparently coming up with a functional protein
from random sequences is pretty easy (statistically, that is). In other
words there's NOT a lot of specified information required to get a folded
protein that does something. There's other evidence that points to this
same thing, e.g. the lambda repressor experiments of Bob Sauer (just to
acknowledge that Mike Behe interprets these experiments in completely the
opposite fashion as Sauer or the rest of the biochemistry community). Other
mutational studies in other systems (e.g. T4 lysozyme) as well as
comparison of paralogous and orthologous proteins point to the same thing.
Then, of course, once it folds (even a little bit) and does something (even
a little bit) then there is fodder for natural selection. So much for
irreducible complexity!
TG
_________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D., Computer Support Scientist
Chemistry Department, Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523
grayt@lamar.colostate.edu http://www.chm.colostate.edu/~grayt/
phone: 970-491-7003 fax: 970-491-1801
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