How so? If life really was as young as you believe it to be (It isn’t) wouldn’t that just mean that life arose relatively recently on a 4.5 billion year old earth that exists in a 14 billion year old universe?
How so? If life really was as young as you believe it to be (It isn’t) wouldn’t that just mean that life arose relatively recently on a 4.5 billion year old earth that exists in a 14 billion year old universe?
It might, if it were not for the fact that we have fossils preserved of complex life forms in layers of rock that are radiometrically dated to millions of years old. All LMEs (large multicellular eukaryotes) should be long-gone by now on an earth that old with life that old. In my upcoming debate, I will be addressing GE, not radiometric dating.
I am happy to shoulder that burden. But it sounds like you are agreeing with me. That is indeed how evidence works, you just happen to think that it is strongly overbalanced on your side. How balanced or unbalanced it is lies outside the scope of my upcoming debate. I will only be looking at GE.
Sure. You have, presumably, some data in search of an explanation. What all the relevant data tell you is that the explanation can’t involve life being a recent phenomenon. And that tells you that the explanation can’t be genetic entropy. You would have to come up with something else. What would that be?
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No, because the evidence that the earth is 4.5 billion years old is the same evidence that tells us life is at least 3.5 billion years old. Sal Cordova at one point was an advocate for old earth, young life, but he was never able to make that work. The two are just mutually incompatible.
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Since GE itself is a member of the set of “all the relevant data”, I don’t agree with your assessment here. And it’s by no means the only member of that set which contradicts radiometric dating. The most important member of all would be the historical testimony of scripture. As I said, however, the only thing under debate on May 13 will be GE, not an overall assessment of the data concerning the age of the earth.
That is a complete reversal of your earlier stance. And on that basis we can dismiss genetic entropy. Even if age estimates were a full order of magnitude too high - itself highly unlikely - genetic entropy would still demand the extinction of all life. That’s very strong evidence indeed, and sufficient in itself to dismiss genetic entropy. Add to that the known bug in Mendel’s Accountant and the lack of empirical evidence and there’s no reason to regard genetic entropy as even remotely likely to be correct.
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It’s not a bug.
Mendel’s Accountant behaves exactly as intended. It was deliberately designed to model beneficial mutations as having less effect on fitness than detrimental mutations. Even when the beneficial mutation reverses a detrimental one.
The problem isn’t the software, it’s the false assumptions being implemented. Garbage in, garbage out.
If @PDPrice relies on it in his ‘debate’ he deserves to be eviscerated.
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Is it? How so? GE appears to have negligible acceptance within the scientific mainstream and negligible (and problematical) empirical support. It would therefore appear to be more accurately characterised as “irrelevant speculation” than “relevant data”.
And radiometric dating is only one of a wide range of lines of evidence that contradicts a Young Earth. Consilience again.
That is an ambiguous claim.
Which religion’s scripture?
Which interpretation of that scripture?
If you are talking about the Fundamentalist Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, then it is unclear why a minority interpretation of a minority religion’s (only about 30% of the world’s population is Christian) scripture is more “important” than all other interpretations and all other religions’ scriptures.
And that’s leaving aside the question of the extent to which it is historically accurate.
That won’t stop it from remaining an overwhelming ‘elephant in the room’.
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GE is not observed and therefore is not data.
I don’t think that men calling Genesis “historical testimony” makes it so - after all men can be wrong. And of course that is religion, not science. Moreover radiometric dating is hardly the only evidence for the antiquity of the Earth. That was determined earlier as geology was found to disagree with your so-called “historical testimony”.
Since it is clearly data relevant to GE then it would seem that you lose the debate.
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Sorry, but you are mistaken. GE is a hypothesis, not data. All manner of data bear on that hypothesis, particularly since a necessary auxiliary hypothesis is that life is only a few thousand years old.
Sorry, not data. Not science. Here you abandon any attempt to claim that GE has anything to do with science..
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Except that history is clearly not the most important thing. If it were, then organizations like CMI wouldn’t need disclaimers like this in their faith statement:
By definition, therefore, no interpretation of facts in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.
These statements reinforce that the primary consideration is a particular theological / ideological viewpoint. Anything to do with academic studies even including historical study of the Bible itself is secondary.
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You say so but then go on to state that you will not be looking at all the data in your upcoming debate.
That if GE was in fact a thing, it would be something you could put on the scale that appeared to contradict all the rest of science. And therefore you’d have to shoulder the burden of explaining all the rest of science. Sure, I agree with that.
Not only that, I don’t believe you even have anything to put on the scale. GE isn’t real. You don’t have a red jellybean to put on the scale to use the classic analogy about evidence.
I get that your upcoming debate will be about whether what you call GE is even real. As such your debate will try to settle whether you even have red jellybean.
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Of course. That was a silly thing for me to write. However, not remotely as silly as this:
I certainly understand the urge to refute ridiculous arguments. But I do have to wonder what Dr. Hancock realistically hopes to accomplish in this debate. Since there is already no reason to take GE seriously, it seems Dr. Hancock might do little beyond reinforcing @UncensoredPilgrims’s misapprehension that he is at all qualified to intelligently discuss this subject.
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Joel Duff has a new blog entry relevant to the discussion. According to new paper cloning a mouse repeatedly did produce deterioration in the cloned genome. Mice breeding normally, of course showed no such deterioration - and breeding a late generation clone with normal mice was able to largely reverse the problems in a couple of generations. Sexual reproduction, it seems, is - at least - a significant part of the explanation of why genetic entropy is not real. And that question - why genetic entropy is not real - is the only scientific question of interest.
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Old news. And things have gotten worse for GE since then.
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If someone develops theory T about how bumblebees are able to fly and that someone else presents a proof that under theory T bumblebees can’t fly, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the proof must be flawed. Rather, it may very well mean that the proof is valid but theory T is flawed. The same logic applies to GE.
Notable here is that bumblebees did not stop flying because someone applied aerodynamics to prove they could not. Further, no one proposed that bumblebees do not actually fly; they only used this to make the point that our understanding of aerodynamics in incomplete. This seeming contradiction was resolved with a greater understanding how vortices contribute the the lift generated by bumblebee wings. This is often the case in science, where conflicting understanding is resolved by improving our knowledge, not by dismissing field of knowledge of knowledge because of an obviously flawed “proof”.
It’s worth noting that “bumblebee” type refutation were once possible possible in the early days of science, when there were still many pre-scientific ideas that lacked empirical support. For example, the theory that all matter is composed of the four elements (earth, air, water, fire). When people started refining metals, all the empirical data and useful result enabled fell on the side of atoms made from the chemical elements. The days of such “bumblebee” refutation are pretty much done, because people have already done the empirical research and produced useful results for all the “easy” questions and most of the hard ones. I could be wrong - there still might be some ideas left to be overturned, but if there are, it will be done using empirical evidence and useful results, not bumblebees.
Now suppose for a moment that someone did use the earlier understanding of aerodynamics to make a claim that in fact bumblebees do not fly. To make such a claim they must ignore the direct empirical evidence of bumblebee flight. They would be ignoring the consilience of evidence that is contrary to their claim. Such is the case with Genetic Entropy; it ignores a consilience of evidence against it, and lack the empirical evidence of (among other things) species rapidly going extinct if the claim is true. We can create scenarios (such as the cloned mice) that demonstrate the cumulative effect of deleterious mutations, but we do not make a “Bumblebees can’t fly!” claim as a result. IOW: this does not refute evolution or population genetics, it is the point where (like the bumblebee proof) a greater knowledge of biology and population genetics begins to apply.
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What do you see GE as in this analogy?
In reference to the bumblebee analogy, GE would be the model that claims that bumblebees cannot fly. Since we have plenty of evidence to contradict this claim, it suggests the model is flawed.
In much the same way, GE proponents suggest GE places an upper limit on the existence of life (although that upper limit is ill-defined). However, GE is contradicted by plenty of evidence suggesting that life has existed far longer than the claims of GE proponents. This suggests GE as a model is flawed.
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Don’t have time to review the whole creation dot com blog, but here is one thing I want to point out:
Junk DNA
Claim: Genetic entropy only works by presupposing a perfect genome but much of it is really random junk. Most mutations are deleterious only for organisms that are already well-adapted. If you presuppose that God created a perfect genome, then naturally any changes will be bad. But real life doesn’t work that way, and genomes were never perfect (or even largely optimal). Changes to the genome are as likely to be good as they are bad.
This is a misunderstanding / straw man.
Junk DNA is not a denial of the existence of ‘perfect genomes’; i.e. a genome with a sequence corresponding to maximal fitness, such that no mutations can be beneficial. It is already on top of the fitness peak. Junk DNA proposes that there are regions within some genomes that do not have an effect on fitness; it can be mutated or deleted without altering fitness. These two propositions are NOT the same.
One can have little to no junk DNA, yet not be at ‘peak fitness’. For example, many viruses have next to none junk DNA, but their genomes are not necessarily at the peak of the fitness landscape.
This also makes me want to ask… how is it possible that any viruses are still around despite genetic entropy? Their genomes are mostly protein coding, so many possible mutations can be deleterious. Also, due to the insane reproductive rates and high mutations rates, one particular virus will readily experience all possible single nucleotide substitution mutations in a fairly short amount of time. Viruses should be the most vulnerable to genetic entropy, especially RNA viruses, yet why are they still around? If the answer is ‘large populations sizes makes selection more effective’, then what makes genetic entropy different from genetic load?
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