I’m not following. Regardless of population genetics, how can genetic decay resulting in prompt extinction possibly be compatible with life sustaining over geologic time? That contradiction is not subtle.
No Paul – it is perfectly possible to have “future empirical observations” about a historical event. All it requires is that the observation be unknown (e.g. because it hasn’t yet been discovered) at the time the prediction was made.
The only difference between “historical and operational science” is that creationist pseudoscientific apologists really, really, really want there to be a difference.
This difference has no more legitimate existence within Science or Philosophy of Science than Genetic Entropy has within Population Genetics.
Yet here you are expecting us to take your word, expressed on Donny-the-ex-nurse’s Standing For Truth Sitting Through BS dog and pony show, that there are “important differences between Historical Science and Operational Science”.
If you weren’t expecting us to take your word for it, I would expect an authoritative Philosophy of Science citation for this claim.
Are you claiming that you won’t be expecting your debate audience to “take [your] word for” it that Sanford’s claim have any legitimate basis in Kimura’s and Ohta’s work, for example?
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A more reasonable conclusion, given that Sanford has no expertise in population genetics (and his claims appear to have zero acceptance from population geneticists) is that he has misinterpreted it and that GE is not “under naturalistic based population genetics” at all.
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But naturalistic based population genetics is distinct from GE, and entirely compatible with deep time (remember, to get deep time to be impossible with population genetics you need to add the assumptions from GE), so the simplest solution is simply not to accept GE when it claims “naturalistic based population genetics” is flawed. Simply don’t buy the assumptions. It really is that simple.
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The first mistake here is the category error of conflating religion with science. The second mistake is i thinking I am blaming God for the the first.
Cool! Show us the new inventions, the patents, the new medical treatment, and the new areas of research and discovery that Creation science has open to us. Because those are the kind of working results that good science provides.
Let’s suppose for a moment that what you say here is true. Mainstream science still works, producing working results. Meanwhile Creation science doesn’t work, it does not produce working results, despite it being mandated from above. The consilience of evidence still points to the mirage.
What is abundantly clear is that Creation science was never about science; it’s all about the argument, nothing more. If there were more, there would be something to show for it.
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This is exactly why I have to keep hammering the issue of historical vs. operational science. It’s not hair-splitting, and it definitely isn’t a made-up distinction. It’s the difference between trying to figure out what happened in the non-repeatable past, and figuring out how the ongoing processes of nature work.
The “results” you keep pointing to are a result of the latter – operational science – not a result of some imagined triumph of Darwinism over creationism. The science that makes computers work, for one example, is not a science that creationists and evolutionists would for a moment disagree about. It’s operational, testable, and repeatable.
Claims about universal common descent are not testable or repeatable. We have to use abductive reasoning to come to conclusions about those questions, much like is done in forensics.
There’s no category error, because “religion” is not a category. The Bible makes claims about history and origins. So do the Darwinists. Those claims are contradictory. Despite what many would have you think, the two are not mutually compatible.
If God was so clear, why are there so many alternative interpretations of Genesis, at least as far back as Augustine?
Which original host animal are you talking about?
“Technical writings”, heh. Name a testable prediction. Name a test of that prediction. Now of course a testable prediction of GE is that all species should be extinct. I have tested that just today. They aren’t.
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Firstly, that wouldn’t matter.
Secondly, it doesn’t explain why the animal viruses are still around.
This is creationism in miniature - make something up and don’t even try to think about the consequences.
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Citation needed.
Perusing this thread I see Paul has learned literally nothing about this topic over the last five or so years. You could drop excerpts from that CMI response article here in place of Paul’s posts and it wouldn’t change the discussion.
If GE is so obviously correct, put in the work and get it published. Convince population geneticists that this math is correct! That’s all you have to do! The book was published twenty-one years ago.
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Do I need to go through all the reasons the H1N1 paper is wrong? Okay.
- They used virulence and codons bias as proxies for fitness; neither is appropriate. (I feel like this one was designed specifically to annoy me.)
- They never directly measured viral replication rate, the actual way to evaluate viral fitness.
- In using the 2009 pandemic strain as the reference genome, they attributed to single-base substitutions (substitution in the genetic rather than phylogenetic sense) differences that were actually due to reassortment (a form of recombination, for anyone who doesn’t know the term).
- They claimed a viral lineage went extinct despite the fact that it was still circulating.
I mean come on. I’m supposed to take this stuff seriously?
And in addition to that, they’ve made excuses for the continued existence of HIV despite it not crossing over into humans since the early 20th century. Each HIV-1 lineage (M, N, and O) jumped one time and one time only and persists since that initial crossover.
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I couldn’t disagree more. For starters:
- It’s not about belief.
- People gradually accepted Darwinian evolution because of the evidence, which despite your pathological avoidance of it, continues to accumulate.
- Your position is political. Ours is scientific.
- It’s about all the evidence found after Darwin’s.
- Fun question: what evidence was included in OoS?
It’s objectively true.
For example, have you analyzed any of the thousands of influenza virus sequences beyond the few that your mentors falsely claimed were “all”?
Is “Spanish flu” a strain designation?
Is “Swine flu” a strain designation?
Is “H1N1” a strain designation?
Is “human H1N1” a strain designation?
I am doing nothing of the sort, as others have pointed out. That’s a tired, old creationist falsehood.
Still wrong. Hypotheses are not information either. But speaking of hypotheses and their empirical predictions, what does GE predict in the case of inbred strains of mice?
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Which animal is that, precisely?
Only evidence, no speculation please. If you can’t ID the animal you can’t honestly claim to know anything whatsoever about viral dynamics. You’re just fabricating.
See, this is a perfect example of your pathological avoidance of evidence.
It’s not “jumping” from one host to other at all. It’s coinfection and reassortment of the genome segments, which IIRC none of the three of you have ever acknowledged exists. Funny, because that’s real-time evolution that you have repeatedly and grossly misrepresented, violating the Ninth Commandment.
They haven’t done any research. If they had any faith, they would have done some instead of misrepresenting research done by others who actually care about human health.
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No.
If there were testable predictions that had been tested, you would point us to the resulting data, not some ridiculously vague reference to “technical writings.” Words are not data.
So, can you point us to a single testable prediction that has been tested?
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You could say what you want, but you would be wrong.
Almost all scientists, including those who are Christians, follow the evidence which plainly and consistently points to an ancient universe. As Galileo stated to those who clung to what they considered God’s clear statements for a stationary earth, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
This is embarrassingly clueless. None of what you say here is anywhere true, but as a particular instance, the oceans are choke full of bacteria, and distinct species of phages which prey on them wholesale, spilling their contents and killing them. Both the host bacteria and invasive viruses have enormous reproduction rates. Let that sink in. Astronomical reproduction rates involving obligatory rapid cycles of constant genetic duplication and mutation. If GE were real, it would be off the scale here, running its course in weeks or months. Now that you know this, you cannot unknow it, so what are you going to do with it?
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Are viruses immune from genetic entropy when they are circulating among non-human animals? If so, how does that work?
Well… that’s not true at all. Many are very pathogenic. A good example is the rabies virus (Lyssavirus rabies), a single-stranded RNA virus that is nearly 100% fatal in any host once symptoms appear. The reason why it keeps circulating is because the incubation period is very long. Rabies has been documented since antiquity and it likely existed for much longer. How is it able to survive genetic entropy?
Also, even if we are dealing with viruses that are able to circulate in a host population without causing severe illness, why does being pathogenic or not even matter to genetic entropy?
The only thing you mentioned that would matter is reproduction rates. If the rate of reproduction is slow, then you would allegedly need to wait longer until the mutations accumulate to the point of extinction. But still, why is rabies able to survive for so long? How long does it need to reach genetic entropy, and why? Or is it able to withstand genetic entropy indefinitely, if so why?
Okay… can you be a bit more specific. What exactly is/are the distinctions here?
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Now that is some beautiful math! I need to spend a little time on this one to do it justice. Please pass along my appreciation to the progeny! 
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Except that that they are. It’s scarcely credible that you do not know this already. Here is a fine example, a classic from The Sensuous Curmudgeon.
OR this, but if I start writing about the stats I’ll be here all night. 
All your “hammering” accomplishes is to show others that you don’t understand science, AND that you are proud of it. It’s PRATT. You may get away with that sort of thing on YouTube, but it doesn’t fly with those who grok science.
… are not the results you have, because you haven’t got any for me to point to. The theory of evolution *could be dead wrong and still be better than anything from Creation science, because ToE produces working results.
I did not say religion (or the Bible) is a category error, that would be silly. I said that you are making a category error. Contrary to what you say, most Christians either find Science and religion to be perfectly compatible, or they separate their thought on such matters (NOMA).
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Yes Paul, it is definitely “a made-up distinction” – one made up by YEC apologists in around the 1960s through 80s – most prominently Henry M. Morris and his colleagues at the ICR. It has zero acceptance outside the Creationist echo chamber.
The Scientific Method does not require repeatability – just new, previously undiscovered, data to test hypotheses against. This data is being discovered all the time.
And this demonstrates the absurdity of both apologetics and of debates – they both allow you to say things like this with a straight face.
Historical sciences such as geology drive fossil fuel exploration, which yields billions of dollars in profits as “results”.
But things don’t have to have happened millions of years ago to be historical and unrepeatable. Often they are studied as soon as they have happened. Epidemiologists and Virologists study historical viral outbreaks to better understand them and how to control and eliminate them.
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Since several of you guys seem intensely interested in viruses, I’ll say this: What I have said on that topic here is a reflection of the views of Dr Robert Carter (or at least, the views he shared with me back when I worked with him), but I would never claim to be as educated as he is on the topic, nor am I at all interested in attempting to answer all of your various questions about viruses.
Rob Carter has stated that viruses don’t escape GE, but personally I’m not terribly interested in the question of whether they do or don’t. For any creature, be it viruses, bacteria, or humans, whether they are affected by GE depends upon a confluence of biological parameters. If you are within a dangerous range, you’ll be affected. If not, then not.
I will be going through this on May 13, but I am not going to go through it all here now. I do hope to see you all there, and you can be sure to queue up to ask any additional questions you may have about GE at that time.