6 or so years ago, I came on here to see what the scientific community had to say about Genetic Entropy. Since then, several debates have been had, but one thing that stands out is how nearly every evolutionist who attempts to refute GE seems to take incompatible routes to do so. That should probably tell us something. Coming up on May 13, another debate will be had, this time against a scientist who places himself in the “Population Genetics” specialty. This may be the first time this will have happened! I encourage you all to tune in and see how it goes–it should be interesting if nothing else.
Many members will recall @UncensoredPilgrims as @PDPrice. He no longer has access to the PDPrice login, but I am satisfied it is the same person.
Since this post is announcing an upcoming debate on Genetic Entropy, I’m guessing Paul will prefer to save that discussion until May (so maybe we don’t need to rehash it all again now?).
3 Likes
So Paul (@UncensoredPilgrims ), the last we saw you was about six years ago when you were still with ICR CMI. I think you left ICR CMI shortly after (thus the lost login?) and I’ve seen your name pop up occasionally. What have you been up to all this time?
1 Like
Dan, to be precise, it was CMI, not ICR. Since then, I have been enjoying family life and working in the corporate world, which I must say I mostly prefer!
2 Likes
These so-called ‘debates’ are always funny to me.
If GE was a legitimate biological phenomenon then experiments should be conducted to demonstrate its existence and relative effects, and these would be published in the primary biology literature. Then further study could be undertaken accordingly.
Instead by regulating these sorts of things to ‘debates’ on YouTube, it will just be another round of professional creationists preaching to the already converted, while giving those who aren’t more things to continue to dunk on.
9 Likes
-
It’s not going to be a so-called debate. It’s an actual debate – otherwise I wouldn’t be wasting my time on it.
-
I think you meant “phenomenon”.
-
As will be shown, the evidence is coming directly from the peer-reviewed literature. The discussion is by no means relegated to YouTube only.
1 Like
Can you give us a preview of your main argument? What were the previous “incompatible routes”, and how would you deal with them?
2 Likes
Is Genetic Entropy any less of a ‘dead horse’ now than it was six years ago?
It’s hard to see any Youtube debate moving the needle on this even slightly, let alone one on a high volume (averaging around a video a day), low impact (averaging 2,200 views per video) channel like ‘Standing For Truth’.
If the topic isn’t “relegated to YouTube” and similar low-impact venues, then I’m curious as to where it is being discussed.
Paul’s framing of it certainly implies that this topic is “relegated” to mere debates – superficial rhetorical exercises, likely to award an ephemeral victory to the side able to put on the better dog and pony show. Hence @AnEvolvedPrimate’s derision.
Dan, I rather doubt that this tired old canard will hold the forum’s attention for a week, let alone the six weeks until this damp squib of a debate.
2 Likes
Why the scarequotes and capitalizations? And what’s with the “who places himself in”? Is Zach’s expertise not actually population genetics?
3 Likes
You’re going to be debating Zach on Genetic Entropy? That should be entertaining.
You have a few months to practice your obfuscation skills and scan the literature for more selective, context-scrubbed quotes to present. That old trick of Henry Morris.
I particularly look forward to the tactic of picking some evolutionist “authorities” and presenting quotations of their work* when you can spin them to serve your case, as big and authoritative truthes not to be questioned, or alternatively as “foundational to evolution” strawmen so it looks all the more impressive when you defeat the straws (the trick Sanford & Basener tried to do with “Fishers fundamental theorem”).
Which of these old favorites will you be going for?
Or perhaps you have finally found a way to define, quantify, and measure creationist-fitness-information-complexity-functionality-innovativity-with-patents-whatever you can show only ever decreases?
*(as opposed to properly contextualized data from large meta-analyses)
2 Likes
I actually published an article detailing all the various “incompatible routes” that I encountered during my first time exploring this issue here.
The ironic thing is that, as far as I’ve seen anyway, my upcoming opponent Dr. Hancock has not endorsed or employed any of the arguments I heard here, save for one relatively minor point.
As far as what I’ll be saying in the debate, I won’t spoil it, you’ll just have to watch. 
Answer: Mutation-drift equilibrium is a standard part of many evolutionary models. Given many millions of years, one would expect genomes to become saturated with mutations, reaching an equilibrium where the number of new mutations is balanced by the number of mutations lost through random genetic drift and purifying selection. However, this is theory only. Mendel’s Accountant has shown us…
Not looking good that one, Paul. I’m sorry to say.
2 Likes
Hancock has three videos up on Youtube on the subject of Genetic Entropy:
Your article makes some valid points and some invalid ones. But the biggest problem with it is that it ignores the simplest objection: genetic entropy requires the assumption of young earth creationism, because given your model of evolution and given that life is billions of years old, every species ought to be extinct, and in fact life should have been extinct before the evolution of eukaryotes. Thus you must address evidence from geology, physics, paleontology, phylogenetics, biogeography, and so on, against a fundamental assumption of the theory.
6 Likes
I don’t have to address all those other fields – if Genetic Entropy legitimately indicates life must be young, that is a piece of evidence that stands on its own, and it stands in opposition to what people in those other fields are claiming. It is a problem for them, not for me.
if that was how science worked then genetic entropy couldn’t be taken as evidence for a young Earth. However science does proceed by consilience so the evidence for an ancient Earth - and the antiquity of life - are evidence against genetic entropy.
I don’t see that it does. Mendel’s Account has a serious bug, genetic entropy doesn’t seem to be observed in real life. That really doesn’t seem to be a solid basis.
The double standard is obvious. In fact given the quality of evidence on each side it seems that the problem is mostly yours.
4 Likes
If I had replied first, I would have said almost exactly what @Paul_King did. Science is unitary. A hypothesis can be tested by any relevant data, and you can’t ignore data from physics just because it isn’t genetics. As Paul notes, you claim that physics, geology, etc. will need to be revised based on your claimed genetic data, and it’s hypocrisy to claim that your theory is not subject to those fields too.
If we see bumblebees in flight, any proof that bumblebees can’t fly must be flawed.
8 Likes
Here is what I will say: all the relevant evidence must be reviewed, and one must use an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning). Providing that overall conclusion for you is not the purpose of the upcoming debate. The purpose is to shine a light on a usually-hidden problem deep at the heart of evolution–a problem which has refused to go away for over 40 years since Kimura originally mentioned it in his 1979 paper.
That isn’t how evidence works.
You are right in the narrow sense that one can have contradictory evidence, placed on their individual sides of the scale and weighed against each other.
But since you’re the one against basically the entire field of science, in other words the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly against Genetic Entropy, you’re the one with a burden of explanation.
The rest of us could, and be entirely justified in basically saying: We have so much evidence against GE that something must be wrong with the theory, even if we didn’t presently know what (though we do know what is wrong with it in actuality).
That is if we assumed there was evidence for GE in the first place (something you could even place on the scale), which there is not.
5 Likes
All well and good, but scarcely needed. While it is worthwhile to understand population genetics and selection, GE can be definitively dismissed without any recourse to rigorous scientific analysis. Simply assume GE is true, then what would we expect? Given the rapid reproductive cycles of viruses, bacteria, rodents and rabbits, these would have died out long ago even within the time allowed under YEC. Think otherwise? Then my friend, you have well past left the world of reason.
So cue the nonsensical special pleading. Bacteria have higher fidelity, something about population fixes up rodents, viruses hide out in reservoirs of stasis, rabbits are actually really sick, blah, blah and blah. Anything to preserve your alternate reality of theology as biology. As has been pointed out, you are arguing against the consilience of science, desperate for that pin prick which somehow is supposed to invalidate everything we have learned about nature since the ice age. But just as fatal is the everyday observation that despite the veneer of technobabble, GE just is not a thing. All those fast reproducing critters are still robustly with us, let alone us lumbering humans. As John mentioned, bumblebees fly no matter how convincing a paper on aerodynamics proving they cannot, and GE is every bit as plainly wrong.
5 Likes