Hi Tim,
You can have a look at 60
It’s certainly charitable of you to bend over backwards to be nice to creationists, but this is bending farther than science will bend. You’re going to break it. Anyone who adopts YEC as the unshakable founding principle of their science isn’t doing science, at least in any areas touching on that principle. If that’s “doing science differently”, then so are astrology, chemtrails, homeopathy, flat-earthism, and all the other pseudoscience beliefs.
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What is the “Primary Axiom”?
Basically, it is the idea that mutations and selection have created all biological information, all life forms.
Have you ever wondered whether you too have an unshakable founding principle of your science ?
Does anyone make that claim? I don’t think so. Is he, in the end, arguing against such a strawman?
That’s the sort of response I expected, an attempt to equate Sanford with real scienctists. We’re all just bound by our preconceptions, we just interpret the same data in light of them, it’s all just opinions, etc. What do you think might be my unshakable founding principle?
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Whether or not he is doing “science” is a different question than whether he is a scientist. He has a phd in science and has published several peer reviewed papers in secular scientific journals. It seems pretty cut and dry that he is a scientist.
Is his YEC work science? The answer here is different.
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Respectfully disagree. The definition of a scientist is “a person who does science”.
But that’s what we’re talking about here, right? A handful of YEC papers have, in disguise, been published in real journals. Some of them have been real science, though strictly of a descriptive nature, and the uses made after publication by the authors have not been. Perhaps we can say that Sanford is a scientist sometimes, but not when he’s doing his YEC stuff.
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I’m not sure why we’re spending so much time arguing over the validity of MA, when there are newer, more flexible, industry-standard forward genetic simulation tools like SLiM available.
If somebody is interested in testing the genetic entropy hypothesis, just model it in SLiM.
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I have a PhD in physics and have published many peer reviewed papers in secular scientific journals. That means I was a physicist, not that I am one today.
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How can you claim that when there isn’t a fitness axis on figure 5? It shows absolute numbers of deleterious mutations only. In figure 4 where the results of the LTEE are shown, it shows absolute numbers of mutations (without scoring them as beneficial or deleterious), but there’s another curve showing relative fitness of the population at different generations sampled, and the curve shows continous fitness increase.
The graphs don’t show the same thing.
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I would be interested in how scientists would respond to point A in @Giltil’s post 60 above. It looks to me like a rehash of the same arguments that have already been advanced and refuted elsewhere, but I’d like to have an expert opinion before I draw that conclusion.
@davecarlson, @Rumraket, @swamidass, @John_Harshman
Thanks!
Chris
I think Sanford is a real scientist, and I think this is indisputable. His YEC work also has some major problems. Both things can be true at the same time.
I think they can only both be true at different times. When he’s a scientist, he isn’t doing YEC work. When he’s doing YEC work, he isn’t a scientist.
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Also, that article is among the most ridiculous nonsense I’ve read in a long time. It concludes with this:
Conclusions
Contrary to a great deal of hype about the famous Long-Term Evolution Experiment, the
actual evidence indicates that this experiment failed to demonstrate macroevolution, or even
speciation.
Who in their right mind thinks this experiment was ever intended to demonstrate anything of the sort?
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It seems to be something more than that. You seem to be saying that there’s some sort of evolutionary axiom that says that all evolutionary processes should, under all circumstances, produce an increase in (some measure of) information and complexity. And that any possible trend the other way constitutes evidence against this strange view of evolution.
But this “axiom” exists nowhere as far as I am aware. I’ve been reading about the subject now for over 10 years and I’ve never come across this putative axiom, ever.
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I did. All you are doing is repeating Sanford’s claim MA is an accurate representation of biology and genetics. You have supplied no independent confirmation of such a claim.
You also couldn’t produce a single example of a non-YEC using MA in any published work.
Looks like MA really is a useless YEC gimmick specifically written only to back up YEC claims.
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So he was a scientist. When he became a YEC he checked his scientific integrity at the door.
What he’s doing now is not science, it’s YEC apologetics.
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Gil please respond to this salient point. Your graph 4 from the real LTEE shows a large fitness increase while the MA graph 5 shows only deleterious mutations. Please explain how those two directly contradictory results magically validate MA.
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It’s something Sanford came up with in his book:
“man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection”