Which is exactly what I'm talking about - break it down into the smallest functional parts and compare those, so you have analogous functions in hand, and do it one at a time. Otherwise, you've got chaff in your wheat. Then, you turn around and look at global comparisons of collections of functional subunits. Bottom-up, not top-down.
Which is exactly what I'm talking about - break it down into the smallest functional parts and compare those, so you have analogous functions in hand, and do it one at a time. Otherwise, you've got chaff in your wheat. Then, you turn around and look at global comparisons of collections of functional subunits. Bottom-up, not top-down.
To what extent would that approach show "SQR(81-(2+2)^53)" v. "53^(2+2)-SQR(81)" to be comparable?
Then you are not looking for MOTA or MTH1022 you are looking for domains. You have to start somewhere and these guys did not start looking for domains they looked at the genes and highlighted the similarities. The approach you favor is what got the bone guys in trouble with the whale. Teeth were important so the mesonychus was daddy whale. Lo and behold, teeth suddenly didn't matter but the ankle does, so out goes the mesonychus and up comes pakicetus. You would have the microbiologists look as silly as the bone readers. The photosynthesis story points out the way things apparently happen for a process.
The specific MOTA gene and MTH1022 have some similarity-- in a range of 55 amino acids they coincide in 23 residues. Now the rest of the gene is necessary to draw conclusions about their total relatedness. We are talking about the genes not the domains/subfunctions. The chaff is part of the story that the microbiologists are trying to spin.