The word “expert” in the title refers to the PS participants, not to me, and not even to Dr Sanford or Carter.
It certainly does when the parameters are realistic. We can’t run an experiment over millions of years, so this is the best way we can “empirically” verify the claims of evolution.
I still think you’re being misleading with this claim. As addressed in the article, we certainly can learn valuable information about the effects of mutations–the overall spectrum–and that’s mostly consistent of effectively neutral ones, by everybody’s account, including yours.
You’ve appealed to junk DNA to justify your claim that effectively neutral mutations are balanced in their effects. But you’ve also denied that effectively neutral mutations occur exclusively in junk DNA. How do we put these things together?