A common objection to the theory of intelligent design (ID) is that it has no power to make testable predictions, and thus there is no basis for calling it science at all. While recognising that testability may not be a sufficient or necessary resolution of the “Demarcation Problem”, this article will consider one prediction made by ID and discuss how this prediction has been confirmed.
5 Replies to “On the Origin of Protein Folds”
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Jonathan:
This is indeed the real stuff we should discuss here!
Thank you for your contribution 🙂
Thanks Jonathan, nice summary. I file your well done article right next to Dr. Axe’s article. Of related interest: Here are some other notes on protein folding that I recently came across:
Computers trying the ‘solve’ protein folding give another compelling piece of evidence for the Intelligent Design of life;
In the year 2000 IBM announced the development of a new super-computer, called Blue Gene, which was 500 times faster than any supercomputer built up until that time. It took 4-5 years to build. Blue Gene stands about six feet high, and occupies a floor space of 40 feet by 40 feet. It cost $100 million to build. It was built specifically to better enable computer simulations of molecular biology. The computer performs one quadrillion (one million billion) computations per second. Despite its speed, it was estimated to take one entire year for it to analyze the mechanism by which JUST ONE “simple” protein will fold onto itself from its one-dimensional starting point to its final three-dimensional shape.
Networking a few hundred thousand computers together has reduced the time to a few weeks for simulating the folding of a single protein molecule:
As well, despite some very optimistic claims, it seems future ‘quantum computers’ will not fair much better in finding functional proteins in sequence space than even a idealized ‘material’ supercomputer of today can do because protein folding is ‘NP complete’:
Here is Scott Aaronson’s blog in which refutes recent claims that P=NP (Of note: if P were found to equal NP, then a million dollar prize would be awarded to the mathematician who provided the proof that NP problems could be solved in polynomial time):
Protein folding is found to be a ‘intractable NP-complete problem’ by several different methods. Thus protein folding will not be able to take advantage of any advances in speed that quantum computation may offer to any other problems of computation that may be solved in polynomial time:
Interestingly, while there are some (perhaps many?) complex protein folding problems found by scientists that have refused to be solved by the brute number crunching power of super-computers (NP-Complete), ‘surprisingly’, these problems have been solved by the addition of ‘human intuition’ (Godel would be pleased);
Another factor severely complicating man’s ability to properly mimic protein folding is that, much contrary to evolutionary thought, many proteins fold differently in different ‘contextual’ situations:
Also of interest to the extreme difficultly man has in computing the folding of a protein within any reasonable amount of time, it seems that water itself, (H2O), was ‘designed’ with protein folding in mind:
Finding water to play a ‘fundamental role’ in protein folding ties biological life, once again, directly to the extreme fine tuning for the foundational universal constants noted in the anthropic principle. i.e. It appears once again, in the words of Hoyle, “a super intellect has “monkeyed” with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” :
Here is a list of many of the anomalous life enabling properties that have been found for water:
A even deeper level of the design of water is noted here:
Also of note, ENV just posted a article on protein folding:
Also of note:
Verse and music:
Ah, but you’re all forgetting that evolution is full of suprises, so they’ll choose to ignore all of its significance, taking the math and the logic in their anti-science stride, and stumble on, unperturbed by any deliberative response.
However, who can doubt that they would have a fit with their leg up, to borrow a curious Australian locution, on reading the article below?
http://www.catholicjournal.us/.....ast-supper
Plato had a very jaundiced view of artists since he felt that they could easily distort reality. Hollywood daily confirms his cynicism.
When it comes to evolution, nothing is more distorted than the common view of fitness landscapes. Kaufman, who started out so optimistic that he could show how evolution is understandable in terms of these landscapes, in the end had to admit that his project was simply not doable.
What we see as the accepted view of fitness landscapes—one which is found in Johnathan M’s paper—is a complete distortion. They show a slope slowly increasing up to a peak. But the reality is that they are, in terms of configuration space, nothing but single lines—i.e., sheer cliffs. And, sheer cliffs 360 degrees around. Dawkins attempts to confuse the issue by suggesting that “Mount Improbable” can be climbed from behind, a view that is blocked from us but that is ‘seen’ by evolution. This is a distortion. This is nothing but fantasy.
The Darwinists can run, but they can’t hide. And eventually molecular biologists will make this painfully clear to them. Time is ID’s ally. Time is Darwin’s “Grim Reaper.”