Yes, extinction of a given strain is generally certain. That is why vaccine formulations are always changing to match with prognostications for the next flu season, with hit and miss results. Sanford either does not understand the most basic principles of epidemiology, or else is only interested in concocting a fabricated pseudoscience to frame his narrative of mutation as information loss.
Viral strains tend to phase out, not from mutations leading to GE, but due to mutations leading to more successful variants. They are out competed by other succeeding strains. We have just seen this vividly and repeated played out with SARS-CoV-1. The survivors of the host population gain some measure of cross immunity to related strains, and thus less successful variants are crowded out of circulation.
A prediction of GE is that RNA viruses exist in natural reservoirs where they are preserved from GE. In science, it is common to postulate yet unobservables entities or phenomena to account for a theory, the higgs boson being a good example. There is nothing puerile here.
So GE exists everywhere we look, but nowhere we do not look? That’s kind of silly.
In science, it is common to postulate yet unobservables entities or phenomena to account for a theory, the higgs boson being a good example.
The difference is that experiments for how Higgs might be observed were proposed long before the technical capability existed. There is no technical barrier to observing biology.
There is still no definition in terms of information or entropy of what is actually being post, unless that loss is equivalent to what is expected to occur under evolution and adaptation.
.>There is nothing puerile here.
Except for the children excuses, nothing puerile at all.
GE predicts that slightly deleterious mutations beneath the threshold of selection inevitably accumulate to where the cumulative effect is catastrophic to the population. This is contrary to preservation of any sort.
There is a difference between a prediction integral to a theory, such as the Higgs field, and a weasel rescue device.
On top of that, natural reservoirs are not some sort of unknown abyss. Influenza is continuously monitored in wildfowl the world over. There are hundreds of papers. We know there is no pristine state of genetic purity out there. If Sanford thinks otherwise, he is welcome to spend more time swabbing cloacas.
How do these natural reservoirs protect RNA viruses from GE?? What’s the mechanism(s) at play here exactly?
Do these “natural reservoirs” prevent deleterious mutations or mutations in general? If so, how? Do these “natural reservoirs” enable natural selection to be effective in weeding out deleterious mutations? Again… if so, how? And/or is there something else going on?
And lastly, what prevents the same rescuing mechanism(s) from happening outside these “natural reservoirs”.
Until you answer those questions… Dan Eastwood description is spot on.
Except… those auxiliary hypotheses have to be testable and put up to the test. The Higgs boson was a testable prediction that is corroborated. Another good example is the existence of Neptune which was predicted to account for Uranus’ orbit which deviated from the predictions of Newtonian mechanics. Likewise, the planet ‘Vulcan’ was postulated to account for the anomalies in Mercury’s orbit, but that prediction was false. There is no planet Vulcan. General relativity accounts for the shortcomings of Newtonian mechanics.
…but in your case, you’re not even proposing an unobserved entity to account for anomalies. You’re just postulating that there must be one… simply because it must. What unobserved entity are you postulating exactly??
Let’s be clear that that is a rationalization, not a prediction of the GE concept. The “hypothesis” of GE is that genomes decay unavoidably to deleterious mutations. There isn’t anything about that proposed mechanism from which it follows that RNA viruses should exist in any particular way that makes them somehow escape GE.
The whole idea of natural reservoirs as a way of escaping GE is a ad-hoc rationalization Sanford has invented to explain away why organisms that shouldn’t be able to exist for long periods of time, according to his idea, nevertheless continue to do so.
The Higgs boson was predicted to have mass within a certain observable range. Sanford’s “natural reservoirs” excuse is completely untestable because there’s no way to extract when, where, or how much some “natural reservoir” should have existed or what magnitude of effect it should have had on any particular RNA virus.
That makes GE basically a pseudoscientific idea. It’s got no actual testable predictions, and is just this strange amalgamation of unquantified rationalizations, partly extrapolated from little to no actual data, working together to save it from empirical falsification.
@Giltil, could you describe what you imagine these “natural reservoirs” might be like? Normally, when we think about things like this as sources of new viral outbreaks, reservoirs are alternate hosts in which viruses are still replicating. This obviously cannot be what you have in mind, because replication means GE.
This is a straw man, at best. But your remark is quite ironical for someone who seems to endorse the claim made by evolutionists that « the evolution of complex molecular machines is nowhere to be seen where we can look, but everywhere where we can’t ».
Not only technical barriers to observing biology can exist, but other barriers may exist too, for examples financial, cultural, lack of incentives etc…
How then would you qualify the excuse given by the proponents of the natural origin of SARS2 for the fact that no animal reservoir has yet been found for this virus?
Every now and then, creationists let the pretense drop and, in so doing, reveal that they actually have no understanding of the scientific method whatsoever. This is such an instance.
The difference, which is so obvious I can’t believe you need it pointed out, is that we know it is common for viruses to pass from one animal to another. So there is no need to postulate some imaginary, unspecified scenario to account for how the virus may have originated other than from a lab leak.
Never mind to tu quoque, more like the Emperor’s new cloths. Only Sanford can see it.
Without a definition, it is impossible to identify GE or a natural reserve of genetic information preserved from GE.
Because we know how to identify such a natural reservoir, should it be found. There is no way to identify GE, or lack of GE, because there is no working definition. You could not identify it if you tripped over it.
There must be some confusion here. To me, the definition of GE seems very clear and it would be very easy to identify. If GE existed, then these graphs would show the exact opposite of what they do show:
