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To: Soliton
Do you have any positive evidence for ID?

milhous taps Soliton on shoulder to ask, "Can I have this dance?"

Leaping into Trouble

...

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 “aF-type ATPase image 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 life—all 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 thousand—more 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, there’s only one way to get an essay.

So, Maynard Smith’s beautiful analogy ends up supporting the design intuition that troubles Darwinism so. And the funny thing is, it’s awfully hard to find an analogy that doesn’t do that. Maybe that’s why so many people are unwilling to leap along with Darwin’s imagination. And maybe that’s why the leapers keep resorting to the same arguments, long after their flaws are known.

30 posted on 05/06/2008 5:22:39 PM PDT by Milhous (Gn 22:17 your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies)
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To: Milhous

That’s a long way to go to admit you have no evidence for design.


35 posted on 05/06/2008 5:30:35 PM PDT by Soliton
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To: Milhous

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.


91 posted on 05/07/2008 1:23:32 PM PDT by Mogollon (Vote straight GOP for congress....our only protection against Obama-Clinton, or McCain.)
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