Define "information"? Creationists aren't even willing to define it

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Yeah and this is where Gilberts response departs from Sanfords, because Gilbert apparently isn’t a YEC, so instead of claiming life can’t be old like Sanford does, Gilbert infers SoMe InViSibLe FoRcE(wink) must have been maintaining genomes against genetic decay all the way since life’s origins.

Why the invisible force elected to design life so as to require constant maintenance against genetic decay over ~4 billion years, instead of just not designing life so it supposedly decays and requires constant maintenance, is anyone’s guess.

Genetic Entropy, to the extend it can even be tested (it technically can’t because it’s proponents can’t predict a magnitude of effect), at least according to Sanford implies life can’t be old. But we have overwhelming evidence life is old. What does Gilbert do? Instead of the most obvious conclusion that GE probably isn’t true, he takes GE as axiomatic and infers a supernatural phenomenon makes old life compatible with GE.

It’s sort of like having an a priori belief that a coin that was once flipped was a fair coin no matter what . Then the ID creationist comes upon a large collection of vast ages of recorded coin flips, sees that the coin has landed tails 90% of the time. Then the ID creationist concludes an unobserved invisible force, an incorporeal coinflipper in control of physics, must have made the (still assumed to be fair) coin land tails, instead of inferring that maybe the coin just wasn’t fair.

:woman_shrugging:

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Can we have a temporary ceasefire? Gil’s car example was a misstep, but that’s enough piling on, including me.

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While the dust settles … this might be a new topic.

Those comments got me thinking about Entropy in the environment. Organism use energy to sustain themselves, and cast off waste energy as heat to the environment.

I think we might reframe the Genetic Entropy concept as the genetic information cast off by selection in order to maintain (or increase) fitness. If too little information is disposed of, then there will be an accumulation in the genome, OR the organism will be unable to adapt to a changing environment, and so lose fitness in the current environment.

Genotypes sufficient for survival in the environment tend to stay in the population, while those lacking in fitness are removed - there’s the “lost” information. If it is possible to align these genotypes, then an information measure like Kullback-Leibler divergence could be applied as a metric. WHY anyone would do this I do not know - it doesn’t seem useful.

This is very different interpretation from what Sanford claims, but it is consistent with physical entropy and information theory. It’s the only way I see that Genetic Entropy can be defined and measured.

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Too many small posts accumulating has degraded his performance?

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How would you be defining/measuring “genetic information” in this reframing? It would appear that it cannot be “‘functional information’ in which the function is fitness”, as this could not be “cast off [i.e. decreased] … in order to maintain (or increase) fitness.”

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Here …

If it is possible to align these genotypes, then an information measure like Kullback-Leibler divergence could be applied as a metric. WHY anyone would do this I do not know - it doesn’t seem useful.

This presumes some underlying multinomial distribution for which we could calculate the Shannon Information.

Correct. Szostak’s FI is really just a percentile or proportion of the population with a given level of function.

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We know that civilizations are mortal.
Yet living civilisations exist today

Similarly,
RNA virus strains are mortal (because of GE).
Yet living virus strain exist today.

What is Sanford’s response that you find puerile?
And yet, there is historical evidence that RNA viruses suffer from genetic entropy, which can also be seen by modeling a pandemic with Mendel’s Accountant, the numerical simulation program developed by Sanford and colleagues. For more on this two points, see the article below by Sanford et al.
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789814508728_0015

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I only infer that there are large gaps in our understanding of evolution.
And please consider that you don’t have to posit a supernatural phenomenon to account for GE. For example, one can hypothesized that stem organisms played similar role in phylogeny than stem cells in ontogeny. We know that the mutation rate is lower in stem cells than in somatic cells. Similarly, the mutation rates of these putative stem organisms could also be much lower than the ones observed in non stem organisms, making them much less prone to GE.

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It’s not the same concept, but your idea here reminded me of this preprint:

Perhaps it will be of interest.

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Well in a way you could consider something like clonal interference where different beneficial mutations compete, and the ones with stronger beneficial effects win out, to be a sort of casting off of FI. The less of the more fit FI is cast off. The population contains different competing beneficial mutants, and the ones with a smaller benefit are outcompeted.

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Neither of which should be the case if Sanford was correct.

Conclusion: Sanford is wrong.

Yes, Sanford created a program that is utterly useless, and never used by anyone other than Sanford, because it was designed for the sole purpose of producing results that supported his beliefs.

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That seems to be inconsistent with statements you’ve made previously in which you stated that some sort of presumption of naturalism was at issue if one was to try to square GE with deep time.

But hey, if you’ve since changed your mind on that and think there are alternative possible natural explanations, I welcome it. I’d just add that GE hasn’t been observationally established, so we are not required to posit something new to account for an unobserved phenomenon. The key element of GE is that selection is powerless to prevent loss of fitness to small deleterious mutations in basically all organisms, and this just hasn’t been observed. On the contrary, the longest-running experiment shows fitness increasing, having caused GE proponents to invent an ad-hoc hypothesis that the species in question might be uniquely immune to GE due to their vast population sizes and small mutation rates.

So GE hasn’t been observed in any of the species it’s claimed to be inevitable in, and was observationally falsified in another. There’s no need to invent anything new.

Another hypothesis is that there’s nothing wrong with canonical population genetics as currently understood, which does not predict the inevitable extinction of whatever species to GE that it’s proponents insist will be suffering from it at some future and unpredictable interval of time.

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And don’t forget this paper (Springman et al. 2010), which shows that natural selection can overcome the effect of ‘genetic entropy.’

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Rusty civilizations? This analogy does not map, at all.

This, from Sanford’s paper you cite, Information Loss: Potential for Accelerating Natural Genetic Attenuation of RNA Viruses

This raises the obvious question – if this is true, why have not all RNA viruses gone extinct?

There is a sound answer for this one. RNA viruses have not gone extinct because GE is not true.

The most likely explanation seems to be that such viruses are preserved in natural reservoirs where they are more stable.

There are hundreds of variants of any given virus extent in natural reservoirs. They are not more stable. Waterfowl take in influenza beak first and variants come out the other end.

In the case of retroviruses, we know they can persist indefinitely in their DNA form (within the host genome). In this form they have very low mutation rates.

Just when I thought it could not get anymore wrong. Besides, why are they even talking about retroviruses in regards to influenza?

For example, the H1N1 strain of influenza apparently went extinct for 20 years in the mid-twentieth century, but it is thought to have been resurrected from a researcher’s freezer in 1977, and is once again
circulating globally

Sure. Ancient cryogenic virus pods kept them fresh for the twentieth century.

There may be many ways that an RNA virus may be held in reserve for long periods of time in natural reservoirs

Maybe many many ways. Can’t think of more now, but there may be many many many ways. Maybe. Details to come. Maybe.

Sanford is selling that GE rendered H1N1 extinct in a single generation, yet somehow H1N1 remained potent down though all the generations of human history. The fact that H1N1 has persisted over that age does not just falsify GE, but further renders it incoherent. It is an Aristotelian A != non-A self contradiction. It is gibberish.

The Argument Clinic
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(Quoting from Ron’s post since I can’t see the original)

That doesn’t sound right. Wasn’t the 1976 swine flu a strain of H1N1 ?

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: The Argument Clinic

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First, as @RonSewell said, we can observe RNA viruses, which have a far greater error rate when it comes to copying their genomes. Yet… for some magical reason… GE doesn’t seem to doom them to extinction.

Second, sequences can “break down” (emphasis on the quotes) without this being detrimental. Sequences can be constantly change without falling down off the fitness cliff.

This is what I criticized at the beginning of this thread. You make the implicit assumption that there is a specific sequence that is the teleological goal. Your second implicit assumption is that any change away from that particular sequence (no matter the consequences) is a… quote… “break down” by definition. Of course, this just a circular position and it’s not even defined. What is the “original” or “unbroken” sequence that we can use as a reference?

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Based on genetic similarity, many virologists consider the 1976/7 circulation to be a genuine lab escape of a H1N1 sample from the 1950’s. For instance, Vincent Racaniello writes in a blog post

the virus was frozen in a laboratory freezer since 1950, and was released, either by intent or accident, in 1977. This possibility has been denied by Chinese and Russian scientists, but remains to this day the only scientifically plausible explanation.

H1N1 is very much with us to this day, and quadrivalent influenza vaccines target it. Sanford claims that it is the particular “human” strain from 1918 that has become extinct, and currently circulating H1N1 are distinct and do not invalidate his GE narrative. In truth, from recombination the 1918 legacy is still extent.

2009 - The Persistent Legacy of the 1918 Influenza Virus

It is not generally appreciated that descendents of the H1N1 influenza A virus that caused the catastrophic and historic pandemic of 1918-1919 have persisted in humans for more than 90 years and have continued to contribute their genes to new viruses, causing new pandemics, epidemics, and epizootics

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Oh look, the sealion is back with his trolling.

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Yes, I”m not questioning that - only the idea that H1N1 was extinct in the wild prior to that outbreak.

Indeed. And even if it did not, it’s hard to see the extinction of one strain of H1N1 as evidence in itself as evidence for genetic entropy. Extinctions can happen and are expected to happen even if genetic entropy isn’t a real problem - and on the evidence it isn’t.

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