By the same standard, because of Babylonian carvings, you must be sure there were winged lions. Thanks to the Greeks you know there were multi-headed reptilian hydra’s, clearly some sort of dinosaur. And chimera’s of every possible human-beast and beast-beast were routine.
Everything died out, dinosaurs, mammals, all of them. The plants died from being submerged. The herbivores, starting with the panda’s, starved waiting for something to grow. The carnivores died after eating the last of the herbivores.
So aside from the fact there was no global flood and we are all here, non-avian dinosaurs lived in a variety of settings, followed distinct lifestyles, and came in every size. So what about the supposed post-flood environment killed them all off in common while suiting everything else? Substantiate and be specific.
Because you say so?
But while on the topic, turn the tables. Why are dinosaur bones pervasively permineralized anyways? At 4500 years, unfossilized dinosaur bone should be the norm. As always, more flood conditions this and that and special pleading I expect. YEC is incoherent.
Cannot be worse than creation.com, and at least on reddit you are free to reply. I think you should take your own advice and read more broadly in the scientific literature in general, starting with geology.
Not only did dinosaurs exist in the Middle Ages, but also harpies, griffins, and many other types of animal and animal/human hybrids. We know that this is true because they are shown as gargoyles on many medieval churches and cathedrals. That proves it!
So you are aware that both Fiorillo and Mori say that the bones are fossilised, but continue to claim they are unfossilised anyway.
Oh? Perhaps you think I should instead get my ‘information’ from your writing instead.
Writing like this one:
in which you suggest that these bones, which everyone who has examined them say have been reddened by infiltration of iron minerals, “remained in pristine condition” - which is simply untrue.
If there is a theory of Brontosaurus even more ridiculous than that of Anne Elk, it is the idea that herds of them were wandering around Britain during the reign of Henry VII, yet somehow managed to avoid being mentioned in the Domesday book, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the Bayeux tapestry, the works of Chaucer, Malory and Caxton, the Magna Carta, Roman histories, the accounts of the plague and the war of roses, the tax records, the law codes or even the various mediaeval bestiaries.
This isn’t ancient history where we’re reliant on a few scraps of copied secondary material. It’s not a remote area with few inhabitants. It’s a well-documented period from which thousands of original written records and artworks have been preserved. Anyone who seriously thinks all those historians, surveyors, authors, artists and chroniclers didn’t think 50ft long reptiles living in the English countryside were worth mentioning is completely, totally, utterly bonkers.
These images are sufficiently crude, lacking in detail, and worn with time that concluding that they’re “definitely” anything is a real stretch. Where in England were these dinosaurs, and why is the only evidence of their purported existence a vague and inconclusive brass? I would have thought, if they had in fact been seen, that such a wonder would be well-documented.
I would note that oddly-distorted medieval images are hardly uncommon:
I’d expect some pretty strong evidence for that claim - ideally physical evidence. What you have is an image from an era where depictions of real animals could be unrecognisable, in a context including depictions of mythical beasts - and the analysis is limited to “it looks like a dinosaur”. That’s hardly enough to overcome the complete absence of physical evidence.
Looking at the image myself I can say that the beast on the left is probably a lion. Lions always seem to have a tuft at the end of the tail, the body looks right and the head can’t be made out - that section seems to be damaged. The beast on the right seems to have hooves on its back feet - and it’s shown as a similar size. It does have a long neck - possibly it’s meant to be a giraffe - although I’ve not seen one with so substantial a tail. Anyway the hooves certainly don’t fit the identification as a dinosaur
A question: would I be unreasonable to use weather-forecasting as an analogy to population genetics models? Both are attempting to model systems that are inordinately complex, in spite of the fact that the basic science underlying them (genetics and fluid dynamics, respectively) are reasonably well understood. In spite of the millions of dollars, and great minds, that has gone into weather modelling, it very rapidly becomes inaccurate with horizons more than a few days out.
Speaking for myself, I would not trust the results of even the most highly-regarded weather forecast modelling software, if in the hands of somebody who lacked the context of a thorough grounding in fluid dynamics, combined with a lengthy apprenticeship under the guidance of a more experienced weather modeller, and then several years spent with such models being their overwhelming professional focus.
And even with such expertise, I would only take the forecast as a best-guess prediction, not as “evidence” of what the weather will be.
I’d say mine is an “argument from experience”. But let’s see which arguments make more sense: your declarations that I’m “conflating long-term Ne with recent Ne” or my argument that what is relevant to the fate of new mutations is current and future Ne.
The effect of previous Ne on what new mutants do is largely through its effect on how much variability is currently nearby in the genome. What somebody called the “Hill-Robertson effect”. And that is greatly diminished by any recombination between the new mutant’s locus and the nearby variants’ loci.
I discovered that 7 years ago there was a PS thread titled ‘were dragons real?’ that prominently figured PDPrice/UncensoredPilgrims as well. The thread went on and on about this madness for nearly 800 posts!!
If anyone wants to go there again, feel free, but count me out. It is just not funny anymore.
You’re rather blatantly ignoring the real issue. Let me try to spell it out. Something like this is what you and I are supposed to believe about the human census population size over time (evolutionarily speaking) :
Dodging the problem of mutation accumulation by appealing to very large Ne based on modern-day population size doesn’t answer Kondrashov’s question of why we haven’t died 100 times over. Keep in mind this is again census size, not effective population size.
I will add as an addendum to the end here, that you have also neglected to answer my question to you about your own Ne calculation. Did you take Hill-Robertson interference into account? Did you take subpopulation structure into account?
I will add as an addendum to the end here, that you have also neglected to answer my question to you about your own Ne calculation. Did you take Hill-Robertson interference into account? Did you take subpopulation structure into account?
The Hill-Robertson effect is only substantial when the other selected loci are very close to the locus that we are considering, close enough that Ne r < 1 where r is the recombination fraction between these two loci. In addition, the other selected locus also has to have substantial enough selection that Ne s > 1. So we have to have a lot of selection at nearby loci for it to be substantial. It is strong mostly when there is no recombination (as in the case of most of the Y chromosome). Or in species that do not outcross.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the literature on defective interfering particles produced by RNA viruses (example rabiesvirus), beginning in the 1980s. That concept alone blows up the notion of genetic entropy.
I should mention two other problems with the assumptions made in the simulations that show constant loss of fitness. Others here have questioned whether the fraction of advantageous mutations stays constant as deleterious mutations pile up. In the simulations they do, but it is less than obvious that this holds in real life. A second issue is the assumption that the distribution of advantageous mutations is the same as that of the deleterious mutations, but reflected and much smaller in fraction. Consider the distribution of mutants just above and just below the current allele. These all differ from the current one by such small amounts that the differences in fitness are nearly-neutral. But the ones above the current allele are far rarer than the ones just below. In other words, the ineffective natural selection has managed to efficiently find the point where the frequency drops dramatically. I question whether that would happen.
