In other words, there are vastly more ways of arranging nucleotide bases that will produce nonfunctional amino-acid chains than there are ways of arranging nucleotide bases that will produce folded and functional proteins. Indeed, for every functional gene capable of coding for a protein fold there is an almost unimaginably large number of corresponding nonfunctional sequences through which the evolutionary process would need to search. To return to our lock illustration, the ratio Axe found implies that the difficulty of a mutational search for a new gene or novel protein fold is equivalent
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