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Author Topic:   Musgrave, Reuland, and Cartwright critique Behe and Snokes (2004)
Nic Tamzek
Inactive Member


Message 1 of 8 (149232)
10-11-2004 9:40 PM


This is an epic take-down, recently posted on Panda's Thumb, of the recent paper by Behe (and a physicist collegue, David Snokes) in Protein Science, which didn't argue for ID, but did argue that most protein binding sites couldn't evolve.
Theory is as Theory Does
by Ian F. Musgrave, Steve Reuland, and Reed A. Cartwright
Page not found · GitHub Pages
(A critical review of this paper:
Michael J. Behe and David W. Snoke (2004). "Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues." Protein Science, Published online before print August 31, 2004. DOI: Just a moment...
Just a moment... )
Musgrave et al.'s conclusion:
quote:
Conclusion
We began this essay with a quotation from Behe complaining that a paper describing an evolutionary simulation (Lenski et al. 2003) had precious little real biology in it. What we see here is that Behe and Snoke’s paper is acutely vulnerable to the same criticism. A theoretical model is useful to the extent that it accurately represents or appropriately idealizes the processes that occur in the phenomenon being studied. Although it is worthwhile to investigate the importance of neutral drift, Behe and Snoke have in our opinion over-simplified the process, resulting in questionable conclusions.
Their assumptions bias their results towards more pessimistic numbers. The worst assumption is that only one target sequence can be hit to produce a new function. This is probably false under all circumstances. The notion that a newly arisen duplicate will remain selectively neutral until the modern function is firmly in place is also probably false as a general rule. Their assumption that 70% of all amino acid substitutions will destroy a protein’s function is much too high. And finally, we have shown that their flagship example does not require a large multi-residue change before being selectable.
And ironically, despite these faulty assumptions, Behe and Snoke show that the probability of small multi-residue features evolving is extremely high, given the types of organisms that Behe and Snoke’s model applies to. When we use more realistic assumptions, though many bad ones still remain, we find that the evolution of multi-residue features is quite likely, even when there are smaller populations and larger changes involved. In fact, the times required are within the estimated divergence times gleaned from the fossil record. We can therefore say, with confidence, that the evolution of novel genes via multi-residue changes is not problematic for evolutionary theory as currently understood.
This message has been edited by Nic Tamzek, 10-11-2004 08:42 PM

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 Message 2 by AdminJar, posted 10-11-2004 10:48 PM Nic Tamzek has not replied

  
Nic Tamzek
Inactive Member


Message 3 of 8 (149515)
10-12-2004 9:07 PM


The various PT people who've critiqued the paper have access via university subscriptions etc. (and, I think the pre-publication version was free online for awhile). In the interests of scholarly inquiry I can email the pdf to any individuals who are interested, if they email me with an obviously nonspam title at chrysothamnusATyahoo.com.

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 Message 4 by AdminJar, posted 10-12-2004 9:13 PM Nic Tamzek has not replied

  
Nic Tamzek
Inactive Member


Message 6 of 8 (149804)
10-13-2004 11:35 PM


Howdy,
There's some confusion here, by "Behe rebuttal" do you mean the Protein Science article by Behe and Snoke?
It's your call what you wish to do regarding a discussion -- there is nothing huge at stake IMO, I just posted the suggestion because I like to see what people think of the Behe & Snoke paper and the Musgrave et al. rebuttal. However, regarding access, the Behe and Snoke Protein Science article is no different than essentially all other journal articles that regularly get discussed (except the few that are open access journals). If you're going to limit threads based on this you're risking shutting off most of the relevant source material...
Regarding copyright, obviously one needs permission to post an article on a website (usually journals give permission to the article authors if they ask), but it is common practice to send a photocopy or a pdf to another individual with a scholarly interest in the topic. This is classic scholarly "fair use." The point of academic papers is, after all, academic discussion, not profit.

Replies to this message:
 Message 7 by AdminNosy, posted 10-14-2004 1:37 AM Nic Tamzek has not replied

  
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