It is no surprise that proteins—the essential machines of life—are not likely to have evolved. At least, that is, if you believe in science. Even according to evolutionists and the most optimistic assumptions possible, the evolution of proteins is so unlikely it is beyond practical consideration. While this conclusion is intuitive and hardly surprising, there are several reasons for it. One of the reasons is that the scenarios evolutionists typically envision involve the pre existence of proteins. For instance, proteins are needed to create proteins, at least in today’s biological world. Indeed, proteins are also required for life as we know it. So the first proteins would have had to evolved in a very different kind of biological world. Another reason why protein evolution is difficult is that the fitness landscape in protein sequence space is mostly flat and rugged. A few random mutations will quickly degrade protein function and most of the hyper-dimensional sequence space has little or no function and is far from a useful protein. It is extremely difficult for a random sequence to migrate via mutations close enough to a useful protein for natural selection to take over. In fact this challenge makes the protein evolution difficult regardless of whether proteins already exist. But in spite of this problem, evolutionists believe that protein evolution is not a significant problem. Recently an evolutionist commented that it is “basically a solved problem.” Read more
27 Replies to “Is the Origin of New Genes “Basically a Solved Problem”?”
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a tipical protein is about 300 aa with 20^300 possiblle sequences. lets say that only 1\3 of the protein is need for is minimal function. this give us a 100 aa for minimal function or 20^100. lets say that the number of functional protein is more than 10^10 of functional sysyems that intellegent desing can made(human). that give us more then the number of atoms in the universe(mutations) for functional protein. even if we consider the synonyms of the dna.
i challenge any evolutionst. isoryy for my english.
mk:
Well said. I stick to my classical example: the alpha and beta sububnits of ATP synthase.
Old protein, has been there practically from the beginning. About 370 identities between bacterial, archeal and human form of the protein. That means about 1600 bits of minimal functional information (about 1:10^480 probability of the functional form).
OK, maybe our darwinist friends are tired of hearing me about ATP synthase. I can understand that.
So, shall we try something else? Let’s say the conserved proteins in Photosystem II, between cyanobacteria and flowering plants?
I am ready, if they are interested.
🙂
As with any number of other things, if Evolution were a valid theory, we should see new proteins appearing in the absence of cellular life. And I haven’t heard of anyone stumbling on such things.
Of course one can assert that the Early Earth was a different place, where magic still worked and unicorns and Leprechauns frolicked on the barren rocks… But at some point you have to admit that assigning an event to “magic” is not any solid logically than admitting that the SIMPLE solution requires a Designer.
Cornelius Hunter is responding to me. My reply:
Even Michael Behe and David Berlinski agree that natural evolutionary processes can create new genes. Look up jingwei and sdic and the literature on their origin. Look up Long et al. 2003. Why can’t you even get these totally obvious basic points right?
jingwei
http://www.nature.com/nrg/jour.....4_BX1.html
“A portion of jingwei was found to be a homologue of the Adh gene …”
Homologue. How much more evidence do you want? It looked very similar and therefore it evolved by natural selection. Totally obvious.
I liked the commentary on Biologos that showed concern about the scientific community’s efforts to offer believable explanations of evolution theory to the general public.
Perhaps scientists could do a better job in ridiculing and insulting people who find their speculations unconvincing. Mandatory evolution-education in schools has rendered us ignorant about evolution, apparently. Or better yet, we’re “fundamentalists” so what can you really expect?
I guess there’s nothing much to wonder about here — it’s all a solved problem at this point.
a. Jingwei
The first entry in the table comes from a study that Long co-authored with Charles Langley in Science. The study asserts that a fruit fly gene, jingwei, arose when part of another gene, Adh, was retrotransposed into a new location on a fruit fly chromosome near a duplicate of the gene yellow-emperor.45 Their evidence for this rearrangement is sequence similarity between part of jingwei and Adh, and part of jingwei and yellow-emperor. Thus, invoking Gene Evolution Game Rules 1 and 3, the authors tell a story that presumes that hypothetical duplicates of yellow-emperor and Adh were fortuitously spliced together to create a new functional gene—jingwei. The exact word used is that exons were “recruited” from elsewhere into the genome “by capturing several upstream exons and introns of an unrelated gene” to produce “a new functional gene.” They author make no attempt to address the more important questions, such as whether a step-wise path to such a genomic rearrangement could have happened by unguided chance to fortuitously produce this gene. Merely finding sequence similarity between exons and other genes (or pseudogenes) does not thereby demonstrate neo-Darwinian evolution.
Long et al. claim that jingwei is only 2.5 million years old, but the original study compared the Adh-like exon in jingwei with the allegedly ancestral exon from Adh and found that they were so different that they must have diverged at least 30 million years ago. This poses a problem, because this fruit fly clade is not thought to be nearly that old; as Long and Langley write, “This conflicts with the age of the melanogaster subgroup, which is estimated to be 17 to 20 million years.” More important, the unexpectedly high degree of differences between the exons is taken, under neo-Darwinian assumptions, as evidence that jingwei “responded to positive natural selection and evolved a new function.” Yet according to one commentator, despite the fact that they are sure natural selection drove this gene to acquire its new function, “its actual function is obscure.”46 So they claim that natural selection was the driving mechanism, but they do not even know for sure in this paper that the gene has a function. They have not addressed any of the deeper questions of gene evolution, instead offering an incomplete and assumption-based story that ignores warnings from Austin Hughes against invoking “positive selection divorced from any biological mechanism.”47
http://www.ideacenter.org/cont.....hp/id/1501
Luskin’s critique is ridiculous from top to bottom:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/arc.....-th-2.html
And, why should I take any of your skepticism seriously, when Behe himself, your guys’ highest authority, agrees that natural processes can produce new genes, even new gene essential to the organism?
NickMatzke- Please tell us how it was determined that gene duplication followed by function altering changes is a blind watchmaker process.
ID is not anti-evolution, NickMatzke. ID says that organisms were designed to evolve and evolved by design.
Let’s see how the next court case deals with that fact.
What Behe says is that genes can evolve if there is probabilistic pathway, however, in reality such pathways are extremely limited as is reflected by the evidence.
What you claim is that everything evolved, and who cares how ridiculous the pathway is or how many improbable neutral or deleterious steps it takes to get there, and never mind the mathematical impossibilities, just say it evolved and force the schools to teach that to the children without question.
As Cornelius points out, the probability of a novel gene evolving is so remote as to be impossible, especially when one regards abiogenesis scenarios. The fact that you can tell a crazy story about jingwei proves nothing. There is difference between science and making stuff up.
Look we’ve got one of the dirt worshipping disciples commenting here himself. Obviously Cornelius said something about his religion that has left him frothing at the mouth. That means whatever was said must be true.
Nick, the law will only protect your religion for a little while more and then it will be tickets for god Darwin and his blind cult followers.
Enjoy it while it lasts….
Joe:
You are absolutely right.
Nick Matzke obviously does not understand the problem.
It is perfectly clear that new genes evolve. Form where does he think that we believe all the existing genes came?
But that “natural evolutionary processes” can create them, that is all another matter.
Moreover, it is perfectly obvious, as Behe says, that “natural processes can produce new genes, even new genes essential to the organism”, provided that those genes arise through a simple transition.
The problem of exon sfhuffling and of remixing of existing information is complex, and I think we don’t know enough at present to understand if some simple cases could be explained as random events, while others (most certainly) cannot.
I don’t remember, however, Nick Matzke (or anyone else, for that) proposing such a theory for the origin of ATP synthase.
Am I repeating myself? Yes, I am. 🙂
Dr. Matzke claims,,,
Yet Berlinski is hardly in agreement with Matzke and, in fact, Berlinski thinks Mazke ‘hopeless’ for citing Long’s paper as evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution,,
Thus Matzke, besides his long history of literature bluffing, which he is notorious for, has now apparently taken it upon himself to dishonestly claim that ID proponents hold positions that they do not hold.,,,
Wow – that was a response to Luskins critique? Hilarious. It says nothing.
When you don’t have a response, maybe ridicule will work.
LOL — compare homology within a complex biological system to the position of boulder and a nearby ledge. That’s how incredibly stupid the Darwinian ideologues actually are. Amazing. As if the construct of a genetic code is as obvious as a boulder rolling off a cliff. Good example! A pile of rocks after an avalanche. Sure! It’s just about the simple as a celluar function and just as easy to explain! Hahahahahaha.
“Known to occur” — um yes, but “not known to produce new genes”. 🙂
Ok, I’m supposed to take this seriously. Of course, since it came from Panda’s Thumb it must be “real science”.
I love it. Natural selection is more certain than gravity. In the same way that rocks roll off of ledges, mutations create new genes. It’s obvious! 🙂
To account for the origin of a gene, find one that looks like it and then say it evolved from that one. No need for the magic wand of Darwinian selection at all. If a scientist makes the claim, then it must have happened that way, right?
Personally, just because Michael Behe said it, doesn’t mean I need to agree. For me it’s not an argument from authority, but anyway, I’d expect you to come up with something a lot more convincing than what you posted. If that’s your best evidence, I’d say you’re light-years away from meeting the challenge of explaining any kind of evolutionary origin for proteins. It’s a massively difficult task.
I think you’d need to take that seriously because right now, you’ have very little from the Darwinian perspective to work with.
Thats how they figured out selection was at work. Derp.
Computers run by various processes known to occur in nature. Cars do too.
The question is are those various processes known to occur in nature also produced by nature, operating freely? Artifacts are known to occur in nature but they are never produced by nature.
Dear bornagain77-
Please stop slapping the guests around with the facts. Have you no decency, sir? 😎
Dear gpuccio- (sarcasm warning)
ATP synthase is too specific. Evolution doesn’t work like that- there isn’t any search for any specific target. The process just runs and if it happens to collect stuff that works, great. If it collects stuff that kills it, well, that’s bad, OK. But the main part is the stuff that works or at least isn’t fatal. That can just grow like Nick’s rock pile or a stalagmite. Rock piles can spread out and function as a dam, as long as there is something to dam. So it is with life. It just chugs along collecting stuff until it can’t. And in all that stuff it collected that doesn’t kill it, there will be stuff that just goes together and starts functioning. There’s bound to be an ATP synthase in there somewhere.
That is the stuff of life under evolutionism.
Joe:
You are very convincing, maybe you should switch to the other field (but try to be payed well for that!) 🙂
LOL. Like a pile of rocks. There’s always something really good in there. We usually find something just like an ATP synthase, but a little simpler – you know, like big rocks and small rocks. And genetic stuff is even better than that because when it piles up, it just starts functioning all of a sudden.
To Dr. Matzke’s credit, I’m just glad we can still find someone who’s got the courage to publicly defend Darwinian theory. Or maybe it’s all just a satire? He really works for the DI and he’s paid to entertain us?
When will Nick please publish his book on macro evolution?
NickMatzke_UD:
I must have missed the part where you actually repond to Dr. Hunter’s argument. Is that forthcoming?
gpuccio,
Those proteins are far to old. We need something newer. Can’t you find any proteins that recently evolved, say maybe last thursday or thereabouts?
As Dr. Hunter alluded to, the ‘gene’ is certainly far more complex that is was originally envisioned to be by Darwinists, (or by anyone else for that matter). In fact, in terms of complexity, it is far, far, beyond any Computer program or Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) built by man.
Moreover, the very definition of the gene, due to the overlapping intergrated complexity been dealt with, is being hotly debated,,
also see James Shapiro,,
Nick Matzke has just admitted that naturalistic evolution has no basis in any known process or science
All he has to offer are ad hominems and irrelevancies. By pointing to the obvious and trivial and implying we are ignorant, he is saying that he has nothing.
Nick, why not be gracious and admit this?
By the way, the few examples of recent “de novo” gene formation extolled by our darwinist friends seem to emphasize again the fundamental role of transoposons in shaping functional transitions.
I am very happy of that because, as many probably know, I have always been a big fan of transposons as engineering tools.
Alu repetitive elements are transposable elements which make up about 10% of our genome. They are transcribed, in different modlaities, and constitute about 35% of the
transcriptomic pool of repetitive elements.
From a darwinist point of view, they could well represent the junkest type of DNA, a proliferation of random transposable elements which started about 80 my ago, before the rodent-primate split.
Here is a very interesting paper about Alus and their many possible functions:
“From ‘JUNK’ to Just Unexplored Noncoding Knowledge: the case of transcribed Alus”
http://bfg.oxfordjournals.org/.....l.pdf+html
And here is another interesting paper about Alu positive selection in functional classes of genes:
“Alu and B1 Repeats Have Been Selectively Retained in the Upstream and Intronic Regions of Genes of Specific Functional Classes”
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/ar.....bi.1000610
gpuccio
Interesting acronym:
Just Unexplored Noncoding Knowledge (JUNK).
Thanks.
I just solved the origin of new genes!
Is the Origin of New Genes “Basically a Solved Problem”?
It is now!