Michael J. Behe A (R)evolutionary Biologist
Topic

intracellular transport

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Businessman using modern molecule structure 3D rendering
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“The Old Enigma,” Part 2 of 3

Dear Readers, This post continues directly from Part 1. Koonin is clearly very impressed with the new paper, which he calls “brilliant” and “a genuinely important work that introduces a new and potentially major mechanism of evolution…” His enthusiasm is a good indication that the problem is a major one, and that no other papers exist which deal effectively with it. So what is the paper (a theoretical, mathematical-modeling study) about?  When a mutationless gene is transcribed and translated into a protein, errors can creep in. It turns out that these error rates are much higher than for copying DNA. Using published mutation rates, Whitehead et al (2008) estimate that 1 in 10 standard-sized proteins will contain an error; that is, they Read More ›