Sanford’s book Genetic Entropy originally came out in 2005. His idea has already had its scientific hearing and it failed miserably. Sanford himself might be a nice kindly old gentleman but his YEC genetic entropy claims are pure caca.
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I disagree with him too. Doesn’t change anything I said.
Let’s explore this. Would you say the same about Ken Ham’s work? Where would you draw the line, and why?
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Sanford is an actual scientist, with appropriate training and a scientific career. He refrains from ad hominem. He publishes actual studies that attempt to make sense of the data from his point of view.
None of this is true of Ken Ham. I’d still take him seriously because his rhetoric is crushing everyone else. He has a following that cannot be ignored.
Regardless, pouring contempt on Sanford accomplishes nothing useful. Engage his ideas (as we all are doing) and the conclusion is even more clear.
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Was the past tense intentional? If so, I applaud the usage.
“From his point of view” demolishes the previous part of the sentence. Once you start with the immovable YEC assumption, nothing that follows can be science. Or deserving of respect. One is forced to ignore most of the data.
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Thanks for the typo catch @John_Harshman.
Freudian slip? Apt, if so.
I always appreciate your generosity of spirit and striving to maintain an open and welcoming disposition.
This, though, is what gives me pause. There is always hazard to assigning another’s motivations, but when a scientist makes statements that should be obviously misleading given the required scientific understanding to make the statement in the first place, that suggests a level of disingenuity. While I agree the concept of GE broadly merits discussion, as deleterious mutation are indeed widespread in life, Sanford has pushed the idea to transparently support an YEC agenda, at the cost of his scientific integrity. I cannot speak to his whole body of writing, but he has made a number of specific claims which somebody in position should know better. His post flood lifespan decay curve, directed to a naive audience, presents the uniqueness of exponential decay parameters as significant because they are unique, and thus proof of divine inspiration. Anyone who could work with the basic regression would understand that any real number is unique without being significant due to uniqueness. His H1N1 paper is hopeless as a work in epidemiology, and GE is not to be explicitly found anywhere in that paper even though in other writing he reveals that support for GE was the point of the paper.
Scott Buchanan in his blog further addresses honesty issues, stating
There are various instances of deception or misrepresentation in Genetic Entropy … pretending that synergistic epistasis is meaningless; misrepresenting Kimura’s stance on beneficial mutations ; presenting the human genome deterioration concerns of other scholars without adequately clarifying that they apply only to industrial, not pre-industrial societies; presenting beneficial mutations as too miniscule for any meaningful adaptive impact. The last two items are substantive.
Scott Buchanan - Letters to Creationists
While a scientifically uniformed church member can be forgiven for placing his trust in a supposedly expert authority figure, the scientist putting out misinformation to a lay audience in the first place is more culpable because he should be contextually aware. He is framing the discussion. He is selecting the data to present, the information to exclude, the conclusions to be drawn. It is permissible for Sanford to argue a position, but that would not excuse making statements he should know are without justification.
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This.
I read the book earlier this year. I’m not a scientist. I have an engineering degree and haven’t even used that in 15 years now. I’ve been learning about biology on my own for the last few years. When I got to chapter 2 of that book and went online to read the Kimura paper cited, even I noticed that Sanford was not being honest about it. Most people won’t go read the cited papers.
And the patriarchal decay curve was also less than honest. I expect more from a trained scientist.
As a layperson, seeing instances like this time and time again makes me not able to take seriously anything they say. I’m happy to listen to an honest objection, but once they start lying, I’m out.
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I share many of your concerns. Just focus on the ideas rather than motivations and we all will be far more convincing.
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In the paper that you cited, Sanford wrote the following:
The relentless accumulation of deleterious mutations is primarily due to the existence of un-selectable “nearly neutral” mutations, but the genetic load problem is greatly amplified when mutation rates are high. Intensified natural selection only marginally slows the accumulation of deleterious mutations.
This reminds me of a recent research article that was published in the BMC journal Evolutionary Biology:
The authors reported that mutator strains (i.e. bacterial populations with an extremely high mutation rate) actually managed to evolve back to their initial fitness after a strong fitness loss lasting only a few thousands of generations. Is this compatible with GE?
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I predict the response will be:
“Something something… loss of information… something something”
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Do you mean that Sanford is not a scientist anymore?
He is a scientist now to. I fixed typo.
Thank you. This is important I think
How can a person who begins with a fixed assumption that he is unwilling to examine or change be called a scientist?
In this case he is a scientist doing science differently than us. That explains why we disagree with him.
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Hi Giltil. 
How are you progressing with finding where Mendel’s Accountant was ever scientifically vetted and demonstrated to be relevant to actual biology or genetics? Or those scientific research papers using MA published by non YECs?
Sanford is doing something different than everyone else but it sure isn’t science.
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I would like to set the record straight regarding 2 points put forward in this conversation.
A) Mendel’s Accountant has not been shown to accurately represent actual biological processes (see @Timothy_Horton at 37)
The following 2 examples demonstrate that this claim is false.
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MA was used to simulate deleterious mutation accumulation within an E.Coli type of bacteria, using parameter settings consistent with the famous Lenski’s LTEE experiment and involving similar changes in mutation rate. And guess what ? The simulated results perfectly match the observed pattern of mutation accumulation seen in the LTEE. For those interested, see figures 4 and 5 of this article : https://www.logosra.org/lenski
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MA was used to explore the concept of accelerated mutagenesis as a way to enhance natural genetic attenuation of RNA viral strains at the epidemiological level (https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814508728_0015). Not only is this work very interesting from a medical point of view (it predicts that the implementation of 3 practices would be effective in fighting pandemics), but above all it was validated some months later by the H1N1 empirical study (Sanford and Carter). The authors explain this point in an addendum which reads as follows
Addendum —This study was purely theoretical, based upon biologically realistic numerical simulations. After this chapter was already accepted and finalized, an empirical analysis was initiated of actual mutation accumulation within the H1N1 Influenza viral genome since 1918. The results provided a remarkable validation of the present theoretical study. Within the human lineage, nearly every H1N1 strain that arose very quickly became extinct. All circulating human H1N1 strains went extinct in the mid-1950s, but the human H1N1 lineage was re-seeded into the human population in 1976, apparently from a researcher’s freezer. The human lineage apparently again went extinct in 2009. During the entire history of H1N1 within man, mutations accumulated in a perfectly linear fashion – exactly as seen in this theoretical study. In the course of 90 years, almost 15% of the viral genome mutated, always at a very constant rate. Viral fitness, as reflected by associated human mortality rates, declined continuously and systematically from 1918 all the way to the apparent extinction of the human H1N1 strain in 2009. Because the publication of these proceedings was signifi-cantly delayed, the empirical study was published before the present theoretical study (which spawned the empirical study).
B) About the honesty issue regarding Sanford
Several people here seem to charge Sanford of being dishonest (see @Timothy_Horton at 28 ; @RonSewell at 48). I hope I am wrong here, for this is a serious accusation which, in the absence of solid evidence, would dishonour their authors.
In his post at 48, @RonSewell refers to Scott Buchanan to make the case that Sanford is a liar. But he omits to say that Sanford has responded to Scott. To set the record straight, it is important to listen to Sanford on this issue of honesty:
This book (Genetic Entropy) cost me a great deal. I basically laid down my reputation and my career in order to say what I believe to be the truth. I believe the real deception is clearly the Primary Axiom. I am still convinced I can persuade any impartial person that the Primary Axiom is indefensible (if they will listen). So why would I lie? I am a sincere orthodox Christian, I believe God will judge me in a very literal sense, and I consider lying is a very serious sin. I am distinguished in my field and I greatly value my integrity as an honest scientist. Yet my integrity as a Christian is much more important to me than my scientific standing. That is why I have been willing to defend what I believe to be true, even knowing that attacking this sacred cow (the Primary Axiom) would bring slander and scorn. Why would I write a book that would ruin a very good scientific reputation knowing it would make me a liar before God?
In our personal correspondence, Scott closed our conversation saying he intended to present me as being intentionally deceitful. My last word to him was that while I might be technically in error on certain points, my book reflects what I really believe to be true. Any technical errors in my book show that I am human, but there certainly was no deliberate deception in my book. In light of our previously open exchange, and since Scott professes to belong to Jesus, I do not think he should slander a Christian brother in this way, and I believe he should apologize and withdraw these personal attacks. In terms of the scientific issues, I would ask Scott to append this response to his blog attack.
I still welcome any fair-minded and balanced analysis of the scientific merits of my book and my subsequent studies.
Sincerely,
John Sanford