John Sanford at the NIH

3 posts were split to a new topic: Cordova Moderator Abuse?

What about @stcordova caught your attention?

Although there are concerns, such as expressed in the moderator abuse thread, @stcordova has been honest in other respects. He has spent enough time studying 2nd law of thermodynamics to recognize that those YEC arguments don’t work. And he openly admits that some of his posts at TSZ are trial balloons to test how evolutionists will react to he arguments.

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Here is a transcript with images of the whole talk:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSc5QN_NuYgjwoJ8afcoHcVvE3JTcjqGO0knVJ5u93UyOhWSBDOnhnFUPRKcDpOnGCZwXlK1S-HsnuP/pub

And a reddit discussion kicking off on a response:

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It should be noted that this transcript is only preliminary at the moment. It’s the transcript automatically generated by youtube’s subtitling algorithms, and several people on reddit are in the process of curating it for accuracy and clarity.

A larger discussion can be found here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/9x0yl8/video_of_dr_sanfords_lecture_human_genetic/

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My report and personal commentary on John’s NIH visit:

I highlight not by name, the problem of the Poisson Distribution which is acknolwedged by Nachman-Crowell, Eyre-Walker and Keightly, Dan Graur, and indirectly by Hermann Mueller himself. David Coppedge added a few edits to my original, but was mostly faithful to what I wrote originally.

When I said John was received warmly, several of the NIH staff lingered and were expressing their gratitude to John for speaking. I can say, concern for per-generation increases of heritable disease is on a lot of certain people’s minds. I encountered that when I attended the ENCODE 2015 user conference. An epidemiologist studying the incidence of cancer, took keen interest in Sanford’s ideas because a cursory look at her own data suggests something is amiss with the health of each successive generation.

I notice you omitted Sanford’s scientifically impossible starting premise, that humans were specially created with a “perfect” genome (i.e. reproductive fitness = 1.0) only 6000 years ago. Not very scientific or honest to omit such a critical detail, is it?

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@stcordova, I searched within each of those links, but found no mention of the Poisson Distribution. Can you point me to where this is mentioned, or other discussion of this “problem”? – Thanks.

I’m aware of three distinct issues involving “genetic degeneration” of humans.

  1. Genetic entropy: very slightly deleterious mutations are accumulating in every species because their effect cannot be weeded out by natural selection. We’re all doomed. This is Sanford’s own contribution. As noted above, it assumes we were created with perfect genomes a few thousand years ago and has no connection to real genetics, real health, or real humans.

  2. Genetic load: humans have more than one deleterious mutation per birth, and seem not to have a high enough birth rate to overcome the constant influx. Several quite good geneticists have thought that this was a real puzzle. The puzzle is solved by realizing that humans have no problem carrying a substantial load of deleterious alleles – a load dictated by mutation-selection balance – and that they have always done so.

  3. Relaxed selection pressure: minor physical flaws are no longer subject to harsh purifying selection, and so we are likely becoming slower, stupider, and frailer generation by generation. This is probably true and is of real concern to quite a few geneticists.

I have no idea why anyone would think Sanford an appropriate person to give a scientific talk on any of these subjects.

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Exactly, as this paper makes clear:

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