Sure it is. Youâve said itâs in that state, but you canât say why it got into that state, or provide any evidence that it ever was in that state. So you keep changing the subject.
You donât seem to realize something very basic about that principle: it only applies to aspects of a machine that were engineered to begin with. If an engine has a part that was engineered to 100Îź tolerance, changing the size of the part by 1Îź is not much more likely to hurt engine performance than to improve it. Stop repeating slogans and start thinking about what they mean.
No, because there are multiple additional problems with GE. But since you have yet to provide any reason to think the DFE for effectively neutral mutations looks anything like that for larger effect mutations, thereâs not a lot of point in my worrying about those other issues.
Since even Graur no longer agrees with that quotation, uh, no.
Who is not thinking here? Youâre ignoring how engineering works on a very basic, obvious level.
Thatâs not true. It applies across the board. Take a pile of lumber, for example. Itâs not currently arranged in any functional state. Yet if you make slight changes to that arrangement at random (or in a chaotic, unplanned manner), are you ever likely to get a house? No. Even very slight changes must happen according to a plan, requiring foresight, if they are ever going to amount to an increase in function.
Itâs always harder to get functional results than non-functional ones. The nature of the universe is fundamentally entropic and chaotic. It takes intelligence to bring function to things. It seems to be your fundamental rejection of this reality, on a spiritual level, that forces you to abandon reason in the realm of genetics.
Yes, it is. Thatâs a logical conclusion from what you keep claiming. If every generation is âdegradedâ and worse than the one before then going backwards in the chain means at one point in the past every species had close to âperfectâ genomes. Of course neither you nor Sanford / Carter will deal with that huge problem because you all know itâs demonstrably false. Remember that 700,000 year old sequenced horse genome you keep ducking? So once more we get tryouts for the Run From The Evidence Olympics.
Are you even aware that you just changed the subject? Weâre not talking about how functionality arises. Weâre talking about the effect of small changes to functioning systems, which is what GE is all about. You wanted to use an engine as an analogy, so use it. What is the effect on an engine if a part with a tolerance of 100Îź is changed by 1Îź? Just answer that question.
Biological life doesnât work like human engineering. Not even close. Your lame analogies may work on your uneducated target audience but here they just make you look terrible.
I prefer your insults when you donât coat them with a veneer of piety.
Of course we are. Weâre talking about machines, and weâre talking about functional code.
As has been made abundantly clear, the effect is not likely to be anything noticeable at all in isolation, but in aggregate such changes are overwhelmingly negative. If it were only one change by 1Îź it wouldnât matter. The analogy of the racecars given at the end of https://creation.com/genetic-entropy-vs-evolution certainly comes to mind.
If you want to say that an aggregate of tiny changes produces new function (as evolution requires it to do) then you run into the foresight problem I highlighted with my lumber/house analogy. If you say itâs âbeneficialâ in some nebulous sense that doesnât involve creating new function, then you still have no engine capable of doing what evolution needs it to do.
Interesting factoid: In WW2 the Germans made their tank and aircraft engines with extremely tight tolerances for the moving parts. The Russians didnât have the technology so their engine tolerances were much sloppier. In warm weather the German machines outperformed the Russian ones but in the brutally cold temperatures of the Russian winters (down to -50F) the Russian motors still worked while the tighter tolerance German ones often seized up.
ZOOM! go the rocket powered goalposts as PD tries desperately to change the topic again. 
A key point not yet mentioned when discussing âgenetic entropyâ is its dependence on selection strength. Unneeded genes are lost slowly over time if under no selection while important genes are maintained. Many many experiments and lines of evidence show that natural selection maintains important gene functions and organism fitness over time. Unless you can perpetually eliminate all selective pressure, genetic entropy will never be a roadblock to evolution, and GE can actually be a stepping stone to new functions or new heights in fitness by helping to get out of local maxima on fitness landscapes. Like most intelligent design arguments, it takes a facet of evolution and tries to twist it into something that makes evolution impossible without the hand of God reaching in to fix things constantly. Long term evolution experiments would be impossible if genetic entropy proponents were correct, or maybe God is messing with these experiments!
Two other things to consider:
- Orthologous genes in different or related species can functionally replace each other but if amino acids from one are introduced into the other, several are strongly deleterious. Why didnât these deleterious mutations (in one ortholog) cause the loss of activity in the parent sequence? Compensatory mutations picked out by natural selection as they diverged from a common ancestor.
- Epistasis - two nearly neutral mutations can result in strong negative epistasis, thereby effecting fitness, which prevents accumulation of multiple neutral mutations. Nearly neutral mutations can also be cryptically beneficial due to positive epistasis which provides more pathways for adaptive evolution.
If you remove a single iron molecule from a part in a car will it ever so slightly reduce the integrity of the car? Yes. Does the car suddenly stop working. No. If I remove 1 million iron molecules from all over the car will it stop working? No. In fact, I highly doubt that anyone would notice any difference at all.
It isnât enough to say that tiny changes slightly reduce integrity, especially when you are claiming that such changes will stop the machine from working. You need to show that the amplitude of change is enough to make the machine stop working. You need to show that the accumulation of these slightly deleterious mutations will do what Sanford claims.
Chris cited evidence. If you believe that Chris is wrong, cite evidence, not belief.
Youâre not citing a speck of evidence, so what âseems to be rightâ is pseudoscientific handwaving.
Science is all about testing our intuitions empirically. We often find those intuitions to be wrong.
Isnât he just asserting that God made it in that state?
If thatâs all he wanted to do, there would be no issue. I agree 100% that in a specially created, young world, genetic entropy would likely be a real thing. That wouldnât be an argument against evolution, though â it would just say that if evolution werenât true, it wouldnât be true. What heâs arguing is that GE should happen based on what we know from mainstream biology about real organisms. And in reality, nothing in mainstream biology says that GE should happen.
We addressed this in the joint article. GE is a problem regardless of whether the genome began in a perfect state. Itâs also been addressed by me here in this thread, if you follow my dialogue with Dr Schaffner.
You cannot arbitrarily draw the line where youâd like to stop. It wonât stop at 1 million iron molecules. Mutations are ongoing, forever and ever. The trend is down.
Perhaps the monkey thinks that the broken locomotive is an improvement over the unbroken locomotive.
Engineering works in accordance with strict specifications. Evolution does not work that way.
If it made human beings out of single-celled organisms, then it certainly must.
False.
Sanford has arbitrarily drawn the line when he states that a few thousand years of accumulated nearly neutral mutations will cause species to go extinct. There is absolutely no evidence for this line.
And after a long time you will be mutating the same bases over and over. Only 5 to 10% of the human genome shows evidence of sequence conservation. Sanford would need to show how humans would go extinct if there was a nearly neutral mutation in the other 90% of the human genome. What is the amplitude of fitness loss if that happens?