ENST: Protein Designers Compete for Prizes

Note: Our Editor, David Coppedge, has written many articles for other websites. Each weekend we intend to share some of those articles here at Creation-Evolution Headlines. “ENST” will be a prefix for articles our Editor has written for Evolution News & Science Today.

Since 2011, Mr. Coppedge has written well over 1,600 articles for Evolution News & Science Today, the news site for the Discovery Institute. Here is his latest article from November 20, 2024. The opening paragraphs will be shown, with a link to read the original at evolutionnews.org. You can see a list of his articles under the “Writers” tab, but be aware that most of his articles before 2021 were posted without attribution, the source listed only as “Evolution News.”

Protein Designers Explore Sequence Space

David Coppedge
November 20, 2024, 6:47 AM

The twenty major amino acids used in life as we know it can be assembled in countless ways. What portion of that vast sequence space is functional? This question has had a long history among Darwin skeptics because the answer contributes to probability calculations for assessing the explanatory power of chance vs design for the origin of life.

Historical Background

The Wistar Institute symposium in 1966 has often been cited by ID advocates as a death knell for hopes that functional proteins would spontaneously arise by chance. Around this time in the late 1960s, about a decade after Francis Crick had proposed his famous “sequence hypothesis” for DNA and proteins, my father James F. Coppedge recognized the informational character of biomolecules. Working on a graduate degree in chemistry at UCLA, he attempted to estimate the “usable” portion of sequence space by analogy with useful combinations of letters in English words and sentences. He tested the analogy by searching through tens of thousands of random letters. In his 1973 book, he applied his rough estimate of useful text strings arising by random selections to argue for the extreme improbability of arriving at a single usable protein by chance, even granting a world-sized primordial soup of plentiful amino acids combining under ideal conditions at fantastically rapid rates.

In 1984, Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen in their book The Mystery of Life’s Origin (updated in 2020), wrote about the formidable challenge of overcoming “configurational entropy” in sequence space….

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