Yes more than one mutation that is needed to evolve a new specific function. In this case five specific nucleotide changes on the same short stretch of that specific DNA molecule.
5 different nucleotides doesn't mean 5 different mutations. A single mutation can be as few as a single nucleotide or as large as an entire chromosome. Furthermore, you are focusing on unnamed specific functions again. Which doesn't even make sense, considering the fact that mutations are not truly random because certain mutations are far more likely to occur than others. Hence why a child being born with hemophilia without inheriting it from either parent is far more common than a child being born with an eye color they couldn't have gotten from either parent.
According to the tests, a string of 5 nucleotide changes is something special and very hard to achieve. In fact so hard that just adding one more nucleotide it would take longer than the earth has been in existence.
-_- not sure why you are acting as if the only way to get a string of 5 nucleotides in a location they weren't before is if all 5 nucleotides are inserted.
Original sequence: ATGAATTAG
Insertion of 1 base: ATGAA
ATTAG- frameshift, entire protein product will change, earliest stop codon no longer applies. Sequence is entirely different, not just 5 nucleotides in practice.
Substitution of 1 base: ATG
TATTAG - substitution, amino acid at this location in the protein liable to change, length of protein product unchanged, the codon is different, making all 3 nucleotides in the codon count differently. May influence the function of the protein product/s.
But, at a minimum, it would take only 2 substitution mutations to result in a sequence of 6 nucleotides that have a different effect. And considering that it is fairly common for entire genes to be duplicated and then subsequently get mutated (the most common mechanism by which new genes develop), it seems kinda manipulative to base the emergence of a "functional" sequence of 5 nucleotides as if it can only come about via 5 separate insertions.
For strings of 8 nucleotides, it would take longer than the universe has been in existence.
-_- every human on this planet is born with 40-60 mutations unique unto themselves, so how do you figure? Do you seriously think they are all single base pair substitutions in irrelevant sequences all the time?
Considering apes to humans only takes 6 million years this is a massive time problem.
Last I checked, humans are still apes. Time isn't an issue because your claim that it takes so long for a sequence to come into existence is immensely flawed. It doesn't take into account how common gene duplications are or how most genes in our genome are derived from such duplications accumulating mutations until their function is entirely different. Which can be as few as 1 single base pair substitution mutation, fyi.
Comparing this to a card game is completely different. There are many other factors involved if you read the paper. For one there are influences like drift working against the fixation of a single mutation in the first place and even encouraging harmful mutation to undermine any specific sequence needed let alone the right ones at the right time and in the right place.
Lol, genetic drift is just a matter of trends in how genes pass on to future generations in a population. Sure, by pure chance, a beneficial mutation can end up dying off without ever being passed down, but since over 1% of mutations are measurably beneficial, it is easy to see that eventually, some will persist. For example, let's say 100,000 people have been born thus far today, and assume that each of them were only born with 10 mutations (despite the human average being much higher than that). That makes for a million new mutations introduced into the human population today, and even if only 1% of them were beneficial, that would mean the human population has gained 10,000 benign mutations TODAY. Not only that, but by definition, these mutations make individuals that have them more likely to survive and reproduce than those who don't, so to behave as if genetic drift is just going to eliminate all of them is ridiculous.
To establish a string of two nucleotides required on average 84 million years. To establish a string of five nucleotides required on average 2 billion years.
-_- what the heck? No, 100% no, just looking at the methodology of Behe's "experiment", he should have concluded, just as everyone else has, that within a few hundred years, starting off with a population of 10,000 humans, all decedents down the line would share many of those original 10,000 ancestors if not all of them. Think about it, you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, and so on. It takes about 14 generations for that number to so solidly exceed 10,000 that it would be strange for a person not to have all the lineages that survived in their family tree somewhere. If we consider a human generation to be 25 years, it would only take 350 years for the population to reach that point if it started with 10,000 individuals, assuming that all of those individuals reproduced and had lineages that persisted all 14 generations. It'd take 30 generations if you started with 1 billion people, or 750 years. Thus why even large populations can have beneficial genes become fixed in the population in a relatively short period of time. And this is counting how long it takes for a modern human generation, can you even imagine how short that time frame is for organisms that have a new generation every year?
However, even using the most generous feasible parameters settings, the waiting time required to establish any specific nucleotide string within this type of population was consistently prohibitive.
When there were as many as six nucleotides in the string, the average waiting time (4.24 billion years) approached the estimated age of the earth. When there were eight nucleotides in the string, the average waiting time (18.5 billion years), exceeded the estimated age of the universe.
This statement in his paper is factually incorrect: "single DNA sub-string of minimal length (2–8 nucleotides). This sort of minimal genomic modification would alter only one (or a few) specific amino acids, or might conceivably result in one new specific protein fold."
Any insertion/deletion that isn't a number divisible by 3 has the inevitable effect of changing the reading frame of a gene, making it produce entirely different proteins despite the change to the genome being minimal.
Furthermore, Behe is very obviously doing his calculation based on the probability of a specific spot in the DNA receiving a mutation, and he is doing it poorly. He acts as if the population he has set up is some sort of evolutionary ideal, but it is not. Fluctuating between large population sizes and small population sizes is far better for improving the probability of both a given mutation occurring and becoming fixed within a population within a relatively short amount of time, not a population staying small.
Even larger population won't resolve the waiting time problem and this is also supported by mainstream non-religious and non-biased support from scientists like Michael Lynch who is a top populations geneticist.
When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million (our current upper limit for these types of experiments), the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years. When we extrapolate our data to a population size of ten million we still get a waiting time of 202 million years. Even when we extrapolate to a population size of one billion we still have a waiting time of 40 million years. This is consistent with Fig. 3 of Lynch [15], which for a string of just two specific mutations (when n = 2), suggests extremely long waiting times in smaller populations, and suggests significant waiting times even in a population of 1 billion.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573302/#CR15
Lol, the Lynch paper Behe quotes directly contests his own conclusions. That is, Lynch even calls the dude out by name, hahahahahahahahahaha.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2253472/
"To support their contention of the implausibility of adaptive protein evolution by Darwinian processes, Behe and Snoke started with an ad hoc non-Darwinian model with a highly restrictive and biologically unrealistic set of assumptions. Such extreme starting conditions guaranteed that the probability of neofunctionalization would be reduced to a minimal level. An alternative approach, adopted here, is to rely on a set of biologically justified premises and an explicit population-genetic framework. When this is done, contrary to the assertions of Behe and Snoke that neofunctionalization events involving multiple amino acid residues require 10^8 or more generations and population sizes in excess of 10^9 individuals, it is readily demonstrated that this process can go to completion with high probability on time scales of 10^6 yr or less in populations >10^6 in size. As is discussed below, this is a highly conservative conclusion with respect to both the time and population-size requirements. To put this into perspective, a span of 10^6 yr is small on the total evolutionary time scale (in years) of ~3.8 × 10^9 for all of life, ~2 × 10^9 for eukaryotes, ~7 × 10^8 for metazoans, ~4 × 10^8 for tetrapods and land plants, and ~2 × 10^8 for mammals (e.g.,
Knoll 2003). In addition, a population size of 10^6 is minuscule for most microbes (the species whose genome structure is most compatible with the Behe-Snoke model) (
Finlay 2002)"
By the way, none of the figures in the Lynch paper referenced in Behe's paper are actually in Behe's paper. Behe has some giant testicles for quoting Lynch's paper as if the math in it is anything like his own.
