This is why, to an extent, as I said in message 1, it is confusing. Not just for me, but for creationists and evolutionists. As much as both sides want to believe they have the rational-cookie, in my experience, only the complete detachment of bias in one's mind, works in favour of cogent, coherent, workable logic.
Evolution can be pragmatically (i.e. workable logic) applied to biology. For instance, using the predictions from the theory of evolution you can predict protein function from DNA sequence with 96% accuracy (a large improvement over other techniques).
quote:
PLoS Comput Biol. 2005 Oct;1(5):e45. Epub 2005 Oct 7.
Protein molecular function prediction by Bayesian phylogenomics.
Engelhardt BE, Jordan MI, Muratore KE, Brenner SE.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America. bee@cs.berkeley.edu
We present a statistical graphical model to infer specific molecular function for unannotated protein sequences using homology. Based on phylogenomic principles, SIFTER (Statistical Inference of Function Through Evolutionary Relationships) accurately predicts molecular function for members of a protein family given a reconciled phylogeny and available function annotations, even when the data are sparse or noisy. Our method produced specific and consistent molecular function predictions across 100 Pfam families in comparison to the Gene Ontology annotation database, BLAST, GOtcha, and Orthostrapper. We performed a more detailed exploration of functional predictions on the adenosine-5'-monophosphate/adenosine deaminase family and the lactate/malate dehydrogenase family, in the former case comparing the predictions against a gold standard set of published functional characterizations. Given function annotations for 3% of the proteins in the deaminase family, SIFTER achieves 96% accuracy in predicting molecular function for experimentally characterized proteins as reported in the literature. The accuracy of SIFTER on this dataset is a significant improvement over other currently available methods such as BLAST (75%), GeneQuiz (64%), GOtcha (89%), and Orthostrapper (11%). We also experimentally characterized the adenosine deaminase from Plasmodium falciparum, confirming SIFTER's prediction. The results illustrate the predictive power of exploiting a statistical model of function evolution in phylogenomic problems. A software implementation of SIFTER is available from the authors.
source
What are the practical applications for ID/creationism? None that I have seen.
You can say all you want about beliefs vs. beliefs, but at the end of the day the theory of evolution has real world applications that produce results.
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