Matti Leisola on evolution and the recent Nobel Chemistry prize
| October 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Matti Leisola, author of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, offers some thoughts on the recent announcement:
I am an enzyme bioengineer, so I greeted with enthusiasm Wednesday’s announcement… that part of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a fellow enzyme bioengineer. She is Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech.
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There is one point of confusion in descriptions of this year’s prize winners. It’s the talk of “directed evolution.” The Nobel Prize organization itself has encouraged such talk.
If it is “directed” by researchers engineering the rates for specific purposes, sorting according to specific goals, it isn’t “evolution” in the usual schoolbook sense at all. It is more like plant breeding.
In his book The Edge of Evolution biochemist Michael Behe draws upon research on E. coli, malaria, and HIV mutations. From this he calculates the upper limit for a random mutational process in nature at two to three simultaneous mutations in one protein. This is in harmony with Barry Hall’s results with lactase mutations.
Bioengineers, including the 2018 Noble Laureates in Chemistry, are demonstrating a way beyond this limit — intelligent design. These brilliantly designed experiments involve mutation rates artificially engineered to occur at 10,000 to a million times the rate typical in nature, carefully selected reaction conditions, the intelligently selected use of genetic engineering tools (tools that are themselves intelligently designed), and the mindful selection of variants towards a desired goal.
All of these are hallmarks of intelligent design. Matti Leisola, “How the 2018 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry Harnessed Intelligent Design” at Evolution News and Science Today:
See also: Matti Leisola: Another gifted scientist poised over the memory hole?
Matti Leisola on why lignin (wood) remains enigmatic, in terms of evolution
Is ID-friendly bioengineer a heretic or just a minority reporter?
4 Responses to Matti Leisola on evolution and the recent Nobel Chemistry prize
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It is interesting to note the tremendous medical benefits behind their Nobel Prize winning work:
So, due to this work, it appears that specific disease causing cells, such as cancer cells, can be more readily targeted for destruction by medicines and/or perhaps by the bodies own immune system.
So, other than their conflating their own intelligent selection of a pre-desired result, a pre-desired result that they had in mind all along, with natural selection which has no pre-desired result in mind, this is very impressive work and is also great news for medicine in general.
Exactly! Where is the “directed evolution” oxymoron in this story? The process used is simple organism breeding as done by mankind for thousands of years, in this case sped up by advanced technologies. “Random mutations” are not entirely random as the mutations desired had to converge towards a clear, specified target. Random generator devices also generate within specific ranges, say 0 to 9, rejecting outright any “randomness” outside that range (‘a’, ‘#’, ‘21’ will all be rejected). “Natural selection” is also missing as the selection has been clearly done by qualified researches pursuing a specific goal. At best this would be called “artificial selection”, but even that is misleading since organism breeding is a human activity that goes well beyond simple ‘selection’.
http://nonlin.org/chemistry-nobel-2018/
http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/
Let’s just read the following and then answer the question it raises: does this work impress upon us a sense of the “power” of natural selection?
Leisola then adds:
Oh yes. You see, genetic algorithms running on computer hardware use natural selection. No, really. It really is natural selection taking place inside the computer. Honest.