Genetic Entropy will be debated once again - May 13 on Standing For Truth

[Tim]

@Giltil

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.

Is Genetic Entropy “a proof … under” standard Population Genetics? I’ve seen nothing to indicate so. Certainly Price, Carter and Sanford would seem to want us to believe so, but, given that none of them would appear to have any expertise whatsoever in that field, I for one am not prepared to take their uncorroborated word for it.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Giltil

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.

Science doesn’t deal in proof, so I don’t see your point.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@UncensoredPilgrims

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.

It should tell you that science isn’t debate. If you disagree, can you point to a single scientific advance that came from, or was even confirmed, by debate and not new evidence?

@UncensoredPilgrims

Coming up on May 13, another debate will be had, this time against a scientist who places himself in the “Population Genetics” specialty.

Why the scare quotes? Do you disagree with the categorization?

@UncensoredPilgrims

Here is what I will say: all the relevant evidence must be reviewed…

1. I agree on all the evidence, but your posts from 2020 here definitively show that you haven’t reviewed even the tiniest proportion of the relevant evidence, and even worse, that you are unwilling or afraid to try. For example, did you bother to review the evidence that your upcoming opponent is a population geneticist? Should be easy.

@UncensoredPilgrims

…and one must use an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning).

2. One must not do any such thing, as science is not retrospective explanation. Science is about predicting future empirical observations from mechanistic hypotheses. They merely have to be consistent with all the extant data, which GE definitely is not. Science is about overcoming our error-prone overconfidence in intuition. Your pretense that the very center of science isn’t even part of science suggests a lack of faith on your part.

@UncensoredPilgrims

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.

Paul, are you really that confused or misinformed that you think that a hypothesis is data?

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@RonSewell

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.

There’s an even better subset of rodents that falsifies GE in the short term: inbred strains of lab mice, homozygous at every locus from countless generations of brother-sister mating. They’d be jokes in the wild, but not one has succumbed to GE AFAIK. If GE existed, they’d be prime, rapid victims.

[dsterncardinale]

@Nesslig20

This also makes me want to ask… how is it possible that any viruses are still around despite genetic entropy?

Amazingly, creationists have an answer for this, and that answer disproves genetic entropy! The answer is that because they have very large populations, more mutations are selectable and therefore viral and bacterial populations can fight off GE (just don’t ask about H1N1 I guess?).

Of course, this means fitness effects are context dependent, which means Sanford’s entire model is wrong, but shhhhhhhhhh who cares about that little detail.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@Nesslig20

This also makes me want to ask… how is it possible that any viruses are still around despite genetic entropy?

Paul in an earlier thread linked some apologetics article that appeared to suggest that perhaps very simple organisms such as bacteria or viruses are simultaneously so simple and have so large effective population sizes that GE don’t apply to them.

They have no theory of organismal complexity/simplicity, that relates it to fitness, with which they can calculate the expected rate of fitness decline as a function of that simplicity. They don’t have a measure of simplicity, no equation that describes what magnitude of effect it should have on the DFE of new mutations, and no experiment that has been run anywhere that tests this relationship.

It is literally just a story (a just-so story) they’ve come up with in response to the inconvenient reality that fitness reliably increases in experiments with microorganisms with non-neglible population sizes.
As in, reality proved Sanford wrong, and they were forced to make up this excuse to try to look less ridiculous. In fact that article only appeared on the apologetics websites after discussions here on this forum. There isn’t a thinking person on Earth who can’t immediately see through this.