We told you so!
Four horsemen. No waiting. From Brian Miller at ENST:
One of the most significant projects for the intelligent design movement was Douglas Axe’s research testing the rarity of protein folds. Axe’s method represented the most accurate approach for addressing the problem to date, but his was actually one in a line of studies which concluded that amino acid sequences forming the stable proteins found in nature are exceedingly uncommon. As a consequence, most proteins seen in life could never have originated via random mutations and selection.
One of the early online critics of Axe’s work was Arthur Hunt, who wrote a lengthy critique at the Darwinian advocacy site Panda’s Thumb. His area of expertise is not the evolution of new protein folds, and his arguments revealed a general misunderstanding of Axe’s approach and the field in general. The reviewers of Axe’s JMBarticle which reported his results were experts in protein studies, so they would have identified any of the issues raised by Hunt if they were real. Instead, they published the article affirming both the design of Axe’s experiment and his conclusions. A more recent series of critiques, published by the online journal Sapientia, was aimed at Axe’s book, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed. The four biologists offering these critiques I affectionately refer to as the four horsemen: Dennis Venema, Cara Wall-Scheffler, Joel Duff, and Keith Fox. As Axe pointed out in his response to these critiques, they mostly ignore the main argument of the book — a common-sense argument — choosing to get lost in scientific details instead. Here at Evolution News, Axe has responded specifically to Venema’s critique of his protein work.
Here, I want to flesh out some of the salient details of this discussion. … More.
Also from ENST:
Four Darwin Heretics: A Reader’s Roundup
One, two, three, four books — four recent titles by Darwin skeptics (three scientists, one journalist) in two short years. They are all heretics, all convinced of the same fact: Darwin’s house of cards is collapsing. Science, which is to say the future, is on the side of intelligent design. Let’s look at what they say about the linchpin of Darwinian theory: Charles Darwin’s famous “mechanism” of evolution, natural selection (aka, survival of the fittest). Many would consider Darwinism and natural selection synonymous. More.
Defending the notion that the functional complexity of the self-replicating, digital-information-based nanotechnology of life came about mindlessly and accidentally is becoming more and more like defending the notion that self-replicating robotic equipment might come about that way. That is to say it is has become simply irrational to defend that notion.
The ‘realistic’ estimates for finding functional proteins are all astronomically high:
And even these ‘realistic’ estimates for finding functional proteins may be far to optimistic. As Kurt Durston explains, “interdependence” among amino acid sites in proteins greatly reduce the number of possible functional protein sequences by many orders of magnitude.
And amino acids in proteins are now found to be extremely interdependent:
The reason why the amino acids are extremely interdependent in a protein is because proteins are now found to operate on quantum principles, As the following paper explains, proteins “remain entangled as a single quantum state”
How many orders of magnitude does this interdependence of amino acids within a protein add to the already astronomical estimate for finding a functional protein? Well the following paper states that “finding even one that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,
Moreover, as if all that was not bad enough for Darwinists, quantum entanglement is a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, effect that requires a cause that is not limited to space and time.
I’m pretty sure Darwinists do not want to go the route of looking for a ‘beyond space and time’ cause! 🙂 It pretty much defeats their whole reductive materialistic worldview!
Whereas, Theists, on the other hand. should be very happy with these developments.
bornagain77 @2,
Great stuff, as usual.
Have you ever thought about putting a list of the sources you cite online? Something users can search by topic.
Harry, I have several pages of notes that I have collected through the years, but they are not in any kind of specific order that someone could easily search through. Of course, I know the basic order in which the notes are put together, but that would hardly be useful for anyone who does not know that basic order.
Plus there are many notes that are somewhat obsolete that are interspersed within the pages of useful notes.
It would be somewhat of a monumental task to go through those years of notes to make then easily searchable, concise, and therefore useful to others.