Re: Sean's away; let's play

Gene Poole wrote:
John Harshman wrote:
Since Sean Pitman seems to have wandered off, I've been thinking about his last round of posting, and I at least have come to an important conclusion: all his arguments are irrelevant to what matters most to him.

Let's suppose we grant his thesis, that it's impossible to evolve a protein system with a novel function at the complexity level of 1000 fairly specified residues (and never mind what that means) through mutation and selection. So what? Can anyone name such a system that humans have and chimps don't? Or that humans have and rats don't? Is any such system necessary to account for any feature of the evolution of mammals? Or tetrapods? Or vertebrates? How far down the (supposed) phylogenetic tree from us do you have to go before you encounter the first novel function at yadda yadda? It seems likely to me that, under Sean's criteria, it's entirely possible for all animals to be a single "kind". And doesn't that make his arguments pretty much moot?


It seems to me that the mammalian inner ear must certainly comprise more than 1000 "fairly specified" AA residues,

How can you say that? I doubt that the mammalian inner ear (or even the middle ear) contains any proteins that aren't also found in other amniotes. Remember, we're talking here about new proteins/protein complexes with new functions, not just new anatomy.

is sufficiently irreducibly complex, and is present in mammals but not other amniotes. But here we do have a detailed fossil record of its evolution[1]. In fact, this dove-tails quite nicely into the "nested hierarchy" argument that Sean avoids like the plague these days.

1. Edgar F. Allin, "Evolution of the mammalian middle ear", Journal of Morphology Volume 147 Number 4 (December 1975), pages 403-437.

Sean would just say that it pleased god to create what you're interpreting as a transitional series.

For something more up to date, see Allin, E.F. & J.A. Hopson. 1991. Evolution of the auditory system in Synapsida ("mammal-like reptiles" and primitive mammals) as seen in the fossil record. In: The Evolutionary Biology of Hearing (Ed. by D. B. Webster, A. Popper, and R. Fay), New York: Springer-Verlag. Or this, which is easier to find: Hopson, J. A. 1987. Mammal-like Reptiles: A study of transitional fossils. Am. Biol. Teacher 49:16-26.

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