What is interesting is Carter and Sanford picked six questions they could squirt squid ink at while ignoring all the really huge GE killing problems. One such example dodged was the fact we have sequenced the genome of a 700,000 year old horse so we know horses existed back then. Why haven’t horses gone extinct from GE in 700,000 years? Why does the 700,000 year old genome not show as “closer to original perfection” than the genomes of extant equine species?
Of course there’s also the inconvenient fact life has been on the planet evolving for at least 3.7 billion years including at least 700 million years of multicellular species but life hasn’t gone extinct from GE yet. But you won’t touch that problem just as Carter and Sanford won’t because Young Earth fantasies get absolutely crushed by empirical scientific evidence.
In previous threads where GE was discussed, I also noticed GE proponents either fail to answer this or give poor responses. To a layperson like me, this strongly undermines GE arguments.
Yeah he should answer it, because if GE leads to the eventual extinction of life forms, then it makes no sense that life has persevered for billions of years.
Well, he thinks life has only been around for a few thousand years (ROTFL!) but, even so, according to the modeling he is advocating, most life forms should have gone extinct long ago within that time frame. It’d be interesting to see how Sanford’s modelling applies to the bacterial that live in his own intestines, for instance. If he was correct, his guts should have become absolutely sterile before he left high school.
Sorry but “Mendel’s Accountant” has never been verified to be a biologically realistic simulation. It was published in the journal Scalable Computing which only checked the math functions and said nothing about its biological accuracy. In more than 13 years no one has used MA in any published work except YECs trying to back up YEC talking points.
You guys have to do much better than making your own YEC friendly simulation to “verify” your YEC claims.
Now please tell us why horses haven’t gone extinct from GE in 700,000 years?
They are definitely confusing the map for the territory. It’s a bit like saying that the Earth can’t be more than a few days old because bacteria double every 20 minutes and after a few days the mass of bacteria would equal the mass of the Earth.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact the only reason Sanford came up with Genetic Entropy in the first place was to support his Born Again YEC beliefs. The only reason. To that end anything even remotely connected to actual evolutionary biology got thrown against the wall to see what sticks.
I really don’t see how your premise (mutations of very slight effect are never selectable) logically (therefore) leads to your conclusion (beneficial and deleterious mutations are always in equilibrium).
Hard to know. Try this… Let’s take an imaginary stretch of DNA. Each position has four possible alleles. One allele is optimal while each of the other three is very slightly deleterious compared to the optimal one. If every base starts out in the optimal state, then every possible mutation is very slightly deleterious. That’s GE.
Now your task is to come up with a reason that every base should have been in the optimal state, based on conventional biology. Natural selection didn’t do it, since these differences are invisible to selection. So what did it?
DNA is information. So “optimal” is not a very helpful word. In the word “HOUSEHOLD”, all states are not merely “optimal”. They are required to obtain the meaning.
Now of course you hold that a significant amount of DNA has no function. I personally don’t know if there is much of any “junk DNA”, but it’s becoming more and more clear with time that evolutionists’ presuppositions have caused them to massively overestimate this phenomenon.
But you don’t believe all mutations happen in junk, and you don’t even believe that all effectively neutral mutations happen in junk. That means at least some proportion of effectively neutral mutations will be acting on functional code, which will have an impact on the machine (the body). And for those, the principle of “easier to break than to improve” will certainly apply.
In light of this, you cannot possibly maintain that the distribution between deleterious and beneficial e. neutrals is evenly split. It must be weighted toward deleterious, even if we cannot quantify by exactly how much.
If you wish to discuss fitness and natural selection, ‘optimal’ is a fine word.
A fact that has nothing whatever to do with the issue under discussion.
This is both completely wrong and irrelevant. Whether the DNA is functional or not, you still have to explain why the it was in the fittest state. Give it a try.
Tell me how this functional DNA got into the most functional possible state.
Since I am maintaining exactly what you say I can’t maintain, that suggests that you have an imperfect grasp of the material. I’ve already spent many posts trying to get you to explain how DNA could ever get into this state of perfection and you’ve never even tried. Are you aware that you’re simply evading the problem?
I never said anything about “most functional possible state”. This was addressed in the joint article. The principle of “easier to break than to improve” applies to any functional machine, period. It doesn’t need to be a “perfect machine”. This gets back to the red herring of the “1960s Ford” you originally used, which was addressed.