Wow, Sanford is referencing a paper showing the expected result of a century of population genetics? Stop the press! Hominids have lower effective population sizes than mice and as such must take on an increased mutational load, as they say in the very first sentence you quote. That’s it. That’s not evidence that Hominid genomes are on an indefinite fitness decline, that’s evidence that they have lower Ne.
Hey @thoughtful, please explain to me how growth rate, that is the number of new individuals produced by unit time, makes a difference to how many deleterious mutations there should be, or whether they are visible to selection. Pro tip: It does not.
Yes and that is not a controversial result. In total, more mutations are neutral and deleterious than are beneficial. What is not supported by any research is that the distribution is skewered and fixed such that deleterious mutations of very small effect will accumulate indefinitely.
That last sentence is the key point of contention that really matters to whether GE is true or not, and there is no evidence that it is true. Every word in the sentence matters. I’ll repeat it:
What is not supported by any research is that the distribution is skewered and fixed such that deleterious mutations of very small effect will accumulate indefinitely.
Sanford, Carter, and Price can cite no study that substantiates the claim that the distribution of fitness effects of mutations is skewered and fixed such that deleterious mutations of very small effect will accumulate indefinitely. This result only and exclusively obtains in physically unrealistic mathematical abstractions. But that is all they are, abstractions.
That’s what the tried to do with the H1N1 paper, but failed at doing. @dsterncardinale has this nice video that explains why:
There’s that word “undisputed”. If someone, anyone, disputes it, that gives you some excuse to dispute it too? Can that someone be wrong?
You mean acted in the past in ways it cannot currently act due to advances in medical science, agriculture, and technology? Well they’re right to say that, and that’s not begging the question. It’s flat out ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Simply go compare the infant mortality rates in afghanistan to those in, say, Belgium. Or look up historical rates of death in pre-industrial times due to famin and disease, and then compare them to now.
It’s not clear what the question you’re asking even is. What is it scientists are supposed to “prove” about how they think natural selection acts?
When he says what, specifically, about natural selection?
And bullet #1 was the factually unassailable reality that selection is relaxed in modern industrialized nations, so how does this confirm anything wrt GE?
Well that’s certainly a pretty figure Sanford has drawn there. Why are there no actual numbers on the axes? What experiments did he do to derive the size and distribution of both the curve and the “no selection zone”? Wait, none? Hmmm.