[jwalsh07]

"Cows and pea plants (and, indeed, all the rest of us) have an almost identical gene called the histone H4 gene. The DNA text is 306 characters long. We can't say that it occupies the same addresses in all species, because we can't meaningfully compare address labels across species. But what we can say is that there is a length of 306 characters in cows, which is virtually identical to a length of 306 characters in peas. Cows and peas differ from each other in only two characters out of these 306. We don't know exactly how long ago the common ancestor of cows and peas lived, but fossil evidence suggests that it was somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 million years ago. Call it 1.5 billion years ago. Over this unimaginably (for humans) long time, each of the two lineages that branched from that remote ancestor has preserved 305 out of the 306 characters (on average: it could be that one lineage has preserved all 306 of them and the other has preserved 304). Letters carved on gravestones become unreadable in mere hundreds of years." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker", 1991, p123)

To the innocent bystander with some basic knowledge of mathematics and probability it appears impossible for the Histone H4 gene to have been constructed through a series of small steps since the evidence appears to be that it is so highly conserved for the past 2 billion years. Since the Histone 4 gene has seen only 2 base changes out of a total of 306 when comparing a cow and a pea in around 2 billion years, it is reasonable to ask how that gene had time to assemble and become almost impervious to mutation in the preceding 2 billion years through a series of small steps.

In fact, I think Hoyle is absolutely right. The gene is a problem for NDT. And btw, Korthof, a committed evolutionist, thinks it is as well.

[Torie]

I don't have a clue what you are talking about, or what I am talking about, but hey, the histone forumula ran better than a Lexus, and differentiation over time had to come from other mutational or other mechanisms. We are at once all different and the same!

[Senator Bedfellow]

Not really. It's not "immune" to mutations, it's just that mutations are especially dangerous there - as I said, when one misstep leaves you dead, it's hardly surprising that we don't see a lot of variation. Hoyle's problem is that he's calculating the probability of the thing evolving from scratch, one step at at a time, where every single step is advantageous. Well, that's fine, and if the theory of evolution said that this was the only way things could evolve, it would be a death blow. But of course, that's not the only way things evolve - we know this as a fact, and as far as we know, it's almost never how things evolve.

So in the end, Hoyle's got a crushing rebuttal to an argument that nobody's really making in the first place. And FWIW, Korthof, dedicated though he may be, does not appear to categorize it as a serious problem for the theory of evolution so much as an area in need of further investigation, which of course it is.

[bvw]

I do not understand the praise by any of that book by Dawkins, it is excepting the bat chapter, vanity-publishing mediocre and at times awful. The chapter on little evolutionary line drawings is especially sophmoric. IMO, not (in this post, at least) judging the science, just the writing.

[AndrewC]

Since the Histone 4 gene has seen only 2 base changes out of a total of 306 when comparing a cow and a pea in around 2 billion years, it is reasonable to ask how that gene had time to assemble and become almost impervious to mutation in the preceding 2 billion years through a series of small steps.

You might as well throw this out since it was completely ignored by the nominal politician.