At 04:12 PM 09/17/1999 EDT, Biochmborg@aol.com wrote:
>Glenn, Art's point was not that Yockey used any amino acid at a given site,
>but that Yockey cannot justify his rather liberal assumption regarding the
>variation he permits at most of his sites. From reading his book, it seems
>to me that the only question Yockey asked was what amino acids could be
>substituted at any particular site to give a functional protein. The
problem
>with this question is that it assumes all sites are independent from each
>other, that the amino acid you put in one site has no influence over the
>amino acid that can go into any other site except the two to four closest to
>the first site. In other words, at say site 45, Yockey only cared about
what
>amino acids could go into site 45 that would be compatible with the amino
>acids at sites 44 and 46; he didn't seem to care whether the amino acid at
>site 45 would be compatable with the amino acid at site 16 or at site 98.
Actually he did make some comments in that regard. I would point you to pp
171-172 of his book. It is true that in his calculation he assumed no
intersymbol (amino acid) influence but, he did note how to account for that
once it is known.
I would like to remind everyone of where this issue came from. It came from
my analysis of Spetner's article on information flow. I used Yockey's
calculations. If they are wrong, it still would not hurt my argument that
Spetner vastly underestimated the rate of info flow from the environment
into living beings. So, I would like to ask your assessment of how special
cytochrome c is. How many functional cytochrome c's are there? Nearly
every species has a unique one so that alone should give us around 10
million plus or minus. Does that exhaust the list, i.e. there are no more
to be made under any circumstances?
Give me a number you feel comfortable with and we will redo my calculations
re: Spetner.
By the way, I went through Yockey's Table 6.3 calculating the number of
cytochrome sequences which can be made by KNOWN subsitutions. It worked
out to be around 10^79.
Using this, then my estimate what the rate of info flow should be is much
less but still adequate for evolution. Using the above, and Spetner's
equation for how many correct amino acids could be added to a protein in
evolution it comes to
n~10^79*.84= 8.4 x 10^78 correct symbols to the message.
And if you tell me that there are only 10^14 usable cytochrome sequences,
then the maximum length of a workable protein would be approximately 10^13
amino acids long! And if we are really conservative and say that there are
only 10 million (10^7) useable cytochromes, then one could evolve a protein
of 10^6 amino acids long. Since that is way beyond what we observe
evolution is more than sufficient to account for the diversity of proteins
we see on earth today.
So, what is your number of useable cytochrome c's, Kevin? And please tell
me how you arrived at the number you do.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution