Douglas Axe had succeeded in making a rigorous estimate of the rarity of proteins in sequence space, I wondered what neo-Darwinists would say in response. Given the experimental rigor and mathematical precision of the work he reported in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 2004, and the long odds against mutation and selection ever finding a novel gene or functional protein, what could they say? That the probability of a successful search for new genes and proteins was higher than Axe’s experiments suggested? That his methods or calculations were flawed? That no one else had gotten similar
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