Leaping into Trouble
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Have we found that protein structures, and therefore sequences, are mostly accretions of junk, with just a handful of amino-acid residues forming the equivalent of his four-letter words?
Quite the opposite. I was present in 1997 when the champagne was uncorked at the MRC Centre in Cambridge in honor of John Walker. He was to share the Nobel Prize in chemistry that year with Paul Boyer and Jens Christian Skou for his work on the structure of the enzyme complex that uses pH gradients to drive ATP synthesis. Known as F-type ATPase, this molecular machine is built of dozens of protein chains of seven specialized types. Boyer was not exaggerating when he described it as a splendid molecular machine”. [6] With design elegance and miniaturization wholly unrivaled in human technology, the F-type ATPase is a double energy transducer, first converting gradient energy into rotational energy, and then using the rotational energy to make ATP, the chemical energy currency used in all lifeall in a package 1/500 the size of a small pollen grain.
There is no junk here. The ATPase is made not of four amino acids but four thousandmore like an essay than a paragraph (much less a word). Could it have started out much smaller? Not much, in view of the two sections that have to be coupled for it to work. Like an essay, it might withstand trimming in some places, and some of the parts might be reworded if we knew the rules of composition for proteins. Typos can be tolerated to an extent, as with essays. But none of this explains how random single-letter changes can produce new essays, whether from scratch or from existing essays on other subjects. According to intuition, theres only one way to get an essay.
So, Maynard Smiths beautiful analogy ends up supporting the design intuition that troubles Darwinism so. And the funny thing is, its awfully hard to find an analogy that doesnt do that. Maybe thats why so many people are unwilling to leap along with Darwins imagination. And maybe thats why the leapers keep resorting to the same arguments, long after their flaws are known.
That’s a long way to go to admit you have no evidence for design.
Excellent post milhous. It will go right over the head of most darwinists though since they believe that complex biochemicals such as ATPase self-synthesized by random chance over millions of years.