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

[Tim]

@jeffb

Naturalists really really want there NOT to be a difference, and will always remain difference-deniers.

I would suspect that most “naturalists” (however you choose to define that), scientists who are theists, philosophers of science, etc, etc aren’t even aware that the purported ‘difference between operational and historical sciences’ is something that is being promoted.

It would appear to be purely a confection of YEC apologetics, and known only to YEC apologists and to pro-science observers of YEC apologetics.

This is why, rather than being discussed by serious philosophers of science in serious philosophy of science journals, it is being discussed by a YEC apologist with zero scientific and philosophy of science expertise on (i) an obscure, high-volume, low-impact Youtube channel and (ii) in a YEC apologetics ministry’s in-house ‘journal’. It is the very epitome of “preaching to the choir”. (And we are well aware that you yourself are part of that choir.)

@jeffb

As I watch these historical vs operation science debates I’ve realized that naturalists will never admit the difference.

What “debate”? All I see is the existence of a video of Paul blathering on for two hours on a subject on which he has no expertise, that only garnered 1500 views.

Until he, or some other YEC apologist, can convince a serious philosopher of science to take them seriously, why should I even bother?

Both the internet and general, and Youtube in particular, is chock full of crackpot viewpoints. “Don’t bother until they can find a serious expert willing to take them seriously” would appear to be a reasonable filtering heuristic.

@jeffb

HOWEVER, most of the audience can easily grasp the difference.

That it is “easily grasp[ed]” does not mean it is true:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

@jeffb

Therefore a great approach at that point is to continually point out to the audience their difference-denial.

Jeff, YEC is chock-full of weird and silly claims that the vast majority of the scientific community are completely unaware of. When a YEC apologist points to one of them, the first inclination is simply to laugh. Then, if we’ve got the inclination and the time, we may also pick some of the more obvious holes in the claim.

All it really does is remind us of how silly some parts of YEC are.

(That is not to imply that all YECs are silly – some of them are simply ill-informed – others are serious people laboring in the Sisyphian task of trying to make YEC unsilly.)

[dsterncardinale]

@Tim

@UncensoredPilgrims

Viruses are still around because new ones are constantly replenishing old ones by jumping from animals to humans. Dr Rob Carter has written a whole lot about this, he’s the go-to guy on that topic.

My understanding was that Carter was a marine biologist, not a virologist. Has anything he has “written … about this” been of sufficient rigor as to make it into mainstream virology journals? In what lab has he done primary research on cross-species infections?

“No” and “none”. The H1N1 paper was in "Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling”, which as far as I can tell shut down in 2021. In an email exchange with Carter, he was clear that they did not experimental work on any viruses; it was purely computational, using virulence (mortality rate, specifically) and the match between viral and host codon bias as proxies for fitness, but did not directly evaluate H1N1 fitness experimentally at any point.

(I probably don’t have to explain to this audience why those two metrics are extraordinarily bad proxies for fitness.)

[dsterncardinale]

@UncensoredPilgrims

@Dan_Eastwood

So why haven’t viruses gone extinct in animals?

Because in their original host animal their dynamics is totally different. They are non-pathogenic. Their reproduction rate is completely different. When they jump from a host where they are non-pathogenic into a host they aren’t supposed to be in (like a human), their reproduction starts running out of control, which is what makes them pathogenic. It also causes them to eventually burn themselves out through mutations. This is what Carter & Sanford’s research into H1N1 showed in action.

This is a complete misunderstanding of host-virus dynamics. The underlying model here is that long-standing interactions trend towards commensalism, and this has been observed by it isn’t a generalizable rule. We have counter-examples on both sides of the ledger. Pathogens like measles and syphilis have been around literally as long as recorded human history, and they’re no less pathogenic in the modern world than they were for ancient Egyptians. On the other hand, recent crossovers like HIV-2 and Ebola Reston have extremely low pathogenicity.

Paul is just taking this pop science nonsense at face value with no understanding of the underlying biology.

The real dynamics driving virulence are intra- vs. interhost competition. If intrahost competition predominates, we see selection for rapid replication, with virulence as a byproduct. If interhost competition is the rate-limiting step, selection favors longer periods of infectivity, which drives down virulence. In neither case is virulence the phenotype under selection.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

I assume it means you have a beaker with some colored liquid in it, then while standing next to it you verbalize the hypothesis “by the power of oxidation these two chemicals should precipitate”, and then (while wearing a labcoat and safety-goggles ofc.) you stare intensely at the beaker. If you hate God enough, the reaction in the beaker will respond to your bias making the result untrustworthy.

If that isn’t what they mean I have no idea either.

[Tim]

@Dan_Eastwood

I hadn’t heard of him either.

He seems to have been sufficiently obscure that I had to provide Google with a lengthy quote from @Giltil before it could tell me what this was all about.

@Dan_Eastwood

Pierre-Paul Grassé - Wikipedia

According to the article, and particularly the Dobzhansky review it references, it seems that Grassé’s theory had some major holes in it:

Biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in a review that Grassé’s belief that evolution is directed by some unknown mechanism does not explain anything.

I’m seeing little evidence that his theory was considered viable even in his own day, let alone that it outlived him.

I’m also seeing little evidence that he provided a clear enough definition of what he considered to be “mother forms” (some, ill-defined, or maybe even undefined, subset of stable body plans, it would seem). This would seem to render his theory ‘not even wrong’.

[Giltil (Gilbert Thill)]

@sfmatheson

@Dan_Eastwood

I appreciate that Grasse has attempted to write down a plausible alternative.

Would someone do the courtesy of providing a citation?

The citation below is from Grasse’s book titled « Evolution of Living Organisms »

“The derivation of one type of organization from another never occurs through the intermediary of specialized types. Major evolution has proceeded from archaic form to archaic form — forms which, by their organizational plan, do indeed belong to a well-defined systematic unit, yet retain a structure of a general type… They are the mothers from which spring the phylums that realize a certain morphological type, or idiomorphon, by surrendering to specialization… Creative evolution takes its source in the mother forms; in their absence, new types of organization never appear ».

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@UncensoredPilgrims

@Roy

It is a made-up distinction.

I guess the question isn’t whether it was “made up”, but rather is it a distinction that is useful and helpful? Somebody was the first one to use it, and I guess that person is the one who “made it up”.

@Roy

Both the terminology and the distinction were made up by creationists Charles Thaxton and Norman Geisler in the 1980s.

As I pointed out in my journal article on the topic, that claim was debunked.

You misspelt ‘confirmed’.

[Giltil (Gilbert Thill)]

@John_Harshman

what makes you think that stem cells have a lower mutation rate than other somatic cells?

Well, it happens that I had this notion. Looking further, the situation is probably not as clear cut as I thought. However, it does seem that stem cells have a higher ability to repair their DNA than their more differentiated counterparts. Moreover, I found the reference below that seems to support the idea that ES cells have a lower mutation rate than somatic cells.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.062527199

[AnEvolvedPrimate]

@Tim

It would appear to be purely a confection of YEC apologetics, and known only to YEC apologists and to pro-science observers of YEC apologetics.

And it appears to be done so solely for the purpose of compartmentalization.

In the same way that YECs use microevolution and macroevolution to place a dividing line between evolution they accept and evolution they don’t.

[RonSewell (RonS)]

@UncensoredPilgrims

What has happened in the past when I do this experiment? I assume it will continue to happen in the future

The future? And assume it happened in the past as well Paul. Experiments are designed to capture principles and processes that apply through space and time. Abduce that.

Repeatable experiments (consistent with physical modelling of the basic forces) give us rates of radioactive decay. That’s evidence. Abductive reasoning thus tells us that the earth is billions of years old.

We can observe annual events such as varve formation. That is applicable evidence. Abductive reasoning tells us that varve formations, which are also verified by other independent metrics such as radiocarbon dating, extend back tens of thousands of years and beyond.

We can observe the rate of tectonic drift over hotspots such as Hawaii, and see that the seamount chain rate of erosion matches with the measured rate of a couple of inches per year. That is evidence. Abductive logic tells us that this process has been going on for tens of millions of years.

So it is clear from operational science and adbuctive reasoning that the earth is ancient. Enough of YEC pseudo-intellectial word games. Not only does YEC fail on the evidence, its foundational rhetoric is incoherent. It is classic if you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, bamboozle them with BS.

[John_Harshman]

@Giltil

Moreover, I found the reference below that seems to support the idea that ES cells have a lower mutation rate than somatic cells.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.062527199

A lower rate of a couple of rare mutation types. Nothing to do with the sort of mutations we commonly discuss here, and presumably nothing to do with what you intended.

[John_Harshman]

@Giltil

Grasse’s book titled « Evolution of Living Organisms »

Do you have the least notion what that quote meant, what these “mother forms” might be, how to recognize them in the fossil record, and/or whether they are still around? Based on that quote, which given the ellipses you must have found in a secondary source, they seem to be the ancestors of phyla. But do all members of a phylum spring directly from the mother form, or what? How does this help you if the mother forms disappeared millions of years ago after doing their work?

[John_Harshman]

@Tim

According to the article, and particularly the Dobzhansky review it references

Here’s the review:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1975.tb00221.x?__cf_chl_tk=BLdbSe_r5KbJ2it7PS8lbBM9MHM.T84ZfSO85aurAWY-1775950447-1.0.1.1-LNsZ1AS_urI4Pcq_pXdadxlHFwXDzs.mswGmNQxe1Go

And here’s another. Burn!:

https://academic.oup.com/sysbio/article-abstract/27/4/487/1735057?redirectedFrom=fulltext