More DI Distortions About Axe's Research
Here's a post by John West hauling it out yet again, and this time he's enlisted Axe himself, who before now has been reluctant to claim that his previous papers actually support ID. I guess having the DI paying his salary has loosened up his ethics a bit; the fact still remains that neither of his papers provides any support at all for ID, nor are they a problem for evolution to explain. For a detailed explanation of why Axe's research doesn't support ID, go here and here. Here's the quote from Axe:
I have in fact confirmed that these papers add to the evidence for ID. I concluded in the 2000 JMB paper that enzymatic catalysis entails "severe sequence constraints". The more severe these constraints are, the less likely it is that they can be met by chance. So, yes, that finding is very relevant to the question of the adequacy of chance, which is very relevant to the case for design. In the 2004 paper I reported experimental data used to put a number on the rarity of sequences expected to form working enzymes. The reported figure is less than one in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. Again, yes, this finding does seem to call into question the adequacy of chance, and that certainly adds to the case for intelligent design. This is simply nonsense. The 2000 JMB paper did not show "severe sequence constraints" at all. It showed quite the opposite, that you could make massive changes in the sequence of amino acids in an enzyme, knocking out 10, 20, even 30 amino acids at a time, without completely destroying the function of the enzyme. It showed that you could make 10 substitutions at a time with only a negligible effect on the enzyme's function. And this is "severe sequence constraints"? Not even close. When Dembski claimed that Axe's study showed that "any slight modification" of the protein would "not merely destroy the system's existing function, but also destroys the possibility of any function of the system whatsoever", he was lying. That kind of blatant distortion of the work of another scientist is enough to get you thrown out of a real professional scientific organization; at the DI, it earns you a salary. Isn't it time to bury this corpse, guys? All it's doing is stinking up the place.
More DI Distortions About Axe's Research | 1 comment (1 topical, 0 hidden)
More DI Distortions About Axe's Research | 1 comment (1 topical, 0 hidden)
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