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Author | Topic: Meyer's Hopeless Monster | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Nic Tamzek Inactive Member |
You guys might appreciate:
Meyer's Hopeless MonsterPage not found · GitHub Pages Review of Meyer, Stephen C. 2004. The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 117(2):213-239. by Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry
quote: Online discussions:
IDist Stephen Meyer in peer-reviewed journal A Lovely Dissection ID paper in peer-reviewed journal! Film at 11!
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Nic Tamzek Inactive Member |
About 24 hours after the critique came out the DI posted a scan of Meyer's article on their website:
The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic CategoriesBy: Stephen C. Meyer Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington August 25, 2004 http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command...
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Nic Tamzek Inactive Member |
Wow, this thread has really expanded since the last time I checked. Since I'm Nick Matzke (if you hadn't guessed), I might as well answer ID man's question:
ID Man wrote:
quote: In order:
quote: Nope. It's a website put together by a combination of highly interested amateurs and professionals. If you want, you can ignore it. But the people who put together the website do know more about the relevant topics than pretty much anyone else. But no one there argues that their arguments should be accepted on their authority, only because they make sense and take into account the actual peer-reviewed literature on technical topics.
quote: Depends what you mean. I have a double B.S. in biology and chemistry from Valparaiso University. I've spent several years doing ecology field work. Since you seem interested, I graduated summa cum laude. This gives me two more relevant degrees than Dembski (the author of "Biology in the Subjunctive Mood:A Response to Nicholas Matzke", which you cite) has when it comes to things like biology. I also have an M.A. in geography, with an interest in biogeography and statistical modelling of spatial processes, both of which are relevant in various ways to evolution. (As random examples, the process of dispersal is crucial to understanding anything about how the bacterial flagellum arose, and punctuated equilibrium is actually derived from the biogeographic phenomenon of allopatric speciation) But, I will freely admit that I'm still essentially just at the grad-student level, since I have no biology Ph.D. Disregard me if you like on that score (to be consistent, you'd have to cross out pretty much everyone in the ID movement except maybe Behe). But the articles I cite, for example in the flagellum article, won't go away, no matter what you think of little ol' me. (In the article, I took pains to look up essentially all of the relevant literature on the origin of the flagellum. Since 2003 I've discovered some stuff I missed, and some new stuff has been published; regardless, the 2003 article proved that there was way more out there than even the ID critics realized.)
quote: Heh. First, Dembski conceded that my science was accurate (even though there are a few weaknesses in my article, he didn't catch them). Second, page-counting, rambling about my qualifications, who told him about the article, whether or not I'm a mathematical child genius, and the like, are just off-topic dissembling. Third, Dembski's Big Counterpoint is this:
quote: Intuition? Intuition? He couldn't actually find a big gap in my scenario, so he relies on intuition to tell him there is one? As for detail, I was quite up front about what the right standard for detail was: breaking down the origin of the flagellum into a linear series of protein-protein-binding-site-evolution events. The evolution of a binding site is itself a rather trival "microevolutionary" event that can be approached gradually -- see for example here, here and here for documentation -- so treating these as the "steps" for the unit of analysis is well justified. Dembski of course grapples with none of this.
quote: Yep, and you've got them all, ID man...
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Nic Tamzek Inactive Member |
Howdy,
quote: Mutating a group of amino acids at once. E.g., in a 150 amino acid protein, you might mutated aas 1-10, then 11-20, then 21-30, etc. You might discover that positions 1-10 can be just about anything without destroying whatever function you are testing for, but that 11-20 are very important. This is useful for certain purposes (figuring out how the protein works) but is not very close to any evolutionary process. In evolution, the main process, point mutation, is 1 mutation at a time, and with this kind of small change you can end up changing many more amino acids than if you blast whole chunks of the protein with cassette mutagenesis. IDists of course prefer the cassette mutagenesis studies and ignore the others.
quote: Yes, although the fact that experimental mutation techniques can be biased is not the biggest problem with Meyer's usage of these kinds of studies. The biggest problems are: (1) Evolution usually doesn't mutate a whole bunch of aas at once (like cassette mutagenesis), typically it's one aa at a time. Selection eliminates the failures and keeps/allows the successes/neutrals. (2) The studies that Meyer cites take the "reverse" approach to estimating the density of "functional sequences" -- they take a functional protein, mess it up, and see how many mutants retain function. "Forward" studies, which take random sequences and test for function, get much higher numbers, as Axe (2004) explicitly concedes. (3) Axe (2004), at least, tests for one function, and a fairly specific mechanism for that function. This is a small target. Evolution, OTOH, "tests" for many functions at once, and cares not about mechanism, as long as it works. This is a much bigger target. (4) The origin of new genes is well understood and there are many papers on the topic, all of which Meyer ignored. (5) Lastly, cases of new functional proteins are known to have evolved from non-protein-coding sequences in recent history in the wild and in the lab (google on "nylonase evolution"). Therefore such things clearly are possible, and anyone who denies this just doesn't know what they're talking about. Unfortunately this conclusion must apply to Meyer, the editor Sternberg, and the reviewers Sternberg picked.
quote: Axe (2004) actually concluded that the range of density of functional sequences was between 1 in 10^53 (from a similar study) and 1 in 10^77 (from Axe's study). Meyer only cites the 1 in 10^77 figure, ignoring the uncertainty of about 1 million billion billion billion in the figure. There are numerous other points, e.g. Axe's actual opinion on protein evolution based on his study (he thinks it's quite possible), and the fact that according to Dembski something is supposed to have odds of 1 in 10^150 in order to actually have "CSI." Like the critique says, the mistakes are many and layered. But that's probably enough for now... This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 02-03-2005 17:15 AM
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