Yes, I agree with everything you say (- well, I don’t know the M-H algorithm, but I’ll take that on faith).
I mentioned this explicitly because it’s mindblowingly bad to see someone saying this, with this background, when he says so many other smart things that clearly imply he understands the general principle of local optimizations not being global optimizations.
What he didn’t say is, “This enzyme works really well, and we can be pretty confident evolution has tried out most of the easy modifications on the current structure. It’s not perfect (admittedly), but it’s locally pretty good.”
It was more along the lines of, “We can be confident this is the best possible version of this enzyme.”
Anyway, a single human biologist isn’t the point. I’m much more interested in questions like, how often can I use local optima in an argument, and people will know what I mean / not think I’m crazy for suggesting there are other hills that might be stood upon.
It was more along the lines of, “We can be confident this is the best possible version of this enzyme.”
That’s really bad. If you take any random enzyme shared by humans and chimpanzees both version are going to differ slightly and there no reason to strongly assume that the version of the chimpanzee is optimal for chimpanzees while the version for humans is optimal for humans.
There no reason that a random enzyme without very strong selection pressure is at a local maxima.
Yes, I agree with everything you say (- well, I don’t know the M-H algorithm, but I’ll take that on faith).
I mentioned this explicitly because it’s mindblowingly bad to see someone saying this, with this background, when he says so many other smart things that clearly imply he understands the general principle of local optimizations not being global optimizations.
What he didn’t say is, “This enzyme works really well, and we can be pretty confident evolution has tried out most of the easy modifications on the current structure. It’s not perfect (admittedly), but it’s locally pretty good.”
It was more along the lines of, “We can be confident this is the best possible version of this enzyme.”
Anyway, a single human biologist isn’t the point. I’m much more interested in questions like, how often can I use local optima in an argument, and people will know what I mean / not think I’m crazy for suggesting there are other hills that might be stood upon.
That’s really bad. If you take any random enzyme shared by humans and chimpanzees both version are going to differ slightly and there no reason to strongly assume that the version of the chimpanzee is optimal for chimpanzees while the version for humans is optimal for humans.
There no reason that a random enzyme without very strong selection pressure is at a local maxima.