The origin of new genes

The results of the article you referenced are interesting, but I'm a bit disappointed in the part where the authors considers chance as a possibility. I mean... they only do it for one set of sequences (the sequences being the elements of the set)?Without knowing the total ammount of possible sets, and the ammount of those wherein you'd get no "hits", it's really hard to know if that test has any significance. I mean... maybe the ratio of sets with no "hits" to the ammount of total possible sets is somewhere like... I dunno... 0.25. Then it's not a very impressive test at all, at least not when only performed once (since 1 out of 4 tests would come out with no hits by chance alone).Based purely on my knowledge about how these sort of calculations usually pan out, I do think that this ratio is fantastically small, and so the result would have significance, but I don't know that...If these sorts of calculations were possible however, I would much prefer a calculation of the ratio of the ammount of sets with 470 "hits" or more, to the total ammount of possible sets. This would give us the probability that the actual experiment got a result of the level it did by chance alone.Maybe these sorts of calculations are impossible with todays computer power (considering the sizes of the numbers involved), but in the very least there should be some kind of approximate method, to show that a given ratio is lesser than, or larger than a certain upper or lower bound (depending on which of the previously mentioned numbers one wants to check, "no hits" or "470 or more hits"), that might give you an idea of what kind of numbers we're talking about...With some kind of numbers involved here (and if those numbers pointed in the right direction) I'd consider this yet another overwhelming piece of evidence for evolution... but without them... I dunno...Maybe I'm missing something (maybe these numbers (or something similar) are in the article... I could only read the abstract without paying up a bunch of money I'm not willing to pay)?EDIT: Looking over what I've written, some of it doesn't make sense. For instance, my whole part on the probability of no "hits" is just stupid. Obviously, you'd want the percentage of no "hits" to total ammount of sets to be large... that means that the result of the actual experiment, with 470 hits is unlikely if evolution did not take place.The point I was trying to make stands though... that is, we have no real numbers to tell us how likely any of this is. Yes, performing the test gives us some kind of probability that no "hits" probably is a high percentage of the sets... but it's not very precise. Edited by Maxwell's Demon, : Edited because I realised a large part of my text made little sense, and I wanted to clarify.

Yeah well... see... the reason I'd want some sort of quantification, is creos could easily just claim that god sometimes likes to reuse his gene-designs with small modifications, just as humans will sometimes do with their designs. Such a "prediction" however, cannot give us any numbers. It's just an either/or deal. But it would explain why a randomly generated set of sequences wouldn't find any "hits". God doesn't generate randomly.
Evos would (more obviously) have the upper hand in this case, if some kind of numbers could be produced to quantify the results (which is impossible in the creo "prediction" I suggested).EDIT:
Maybe I'm talking out of my backside here, but that's the way it seems to me. Without numbers all we have is "Evolutionary theory predicts we'd see *some* ammount of hits", and we do. Which would be no better than "Designer likes to reuse designs sometimes predicts we'd see *some* ammount of hits". But since I know there are numbers there... the TOE should be able to easily trump the latter example. Edited by Maxwell's Demon, : Added some stuff after the "EDIT:".

Hah! You're right of course. Good call.Still would feel better with numbers though.