This is a bit off topic*, but have Carter/Sanford ever made any predictions of which species are more likely to go extinct due to GE first, or how long before extant species go extinct? I suppose they could even estimate this from the paleontological record - which I think they do not accept. Even if they did it would probably just reproduce the background extinction rate.
Anyway, my intuition is they are unlikely to offer any new ways they can prove themselves wrong.
* I’ll move this and related comments to a new thread if yet another argument about GE breaks out.
I don’t think so, although I do remember creationists saying something about bacteria not being impacted by genetic entropy. Must be a coincidence that all the organisms we’ve been watching closely enough to exhibit GE all don’t…
Wow, Dr. Ardeern hit the ball out of the park with this one. The legwork on the repetitive regions alone is immaculate! I just finished a video going over Carter’s article, but I will file this away for the inevitable Luskin response.
This bit, right after his figures on repetitive regions, goes so hard: “That seems like enough to kill the claim that human and chimpanzee genomes are actually ~15% different, if different means that the “gap divergence” sequences are present in the human but not the chimpanzee genome. To remind you, Casey Luskin said “At least 12.5 percent … represent a “gap difference” between the two genomes. That means there’s a “gap” in one genome compared to the other, often where they are so different, they cannot even be aligned.” This implies that failure to align, due to major sequence difference, is the norm - but most human “gap divergence” regions in fact usually have a close match (or many) in the appropriate chimp chromosome.”
Oh man, yeah, so the “what counts for genetic entropy?” question is a fun one, because Carter and Sanford very famously have a paper about how H1N1 is affected by genetic entropy, and it’s AWFUL. I mean, for starters, they use virulence and codon match to host as proxies for fitness, and lol on both counts. I swear they preemptively wrote that paper to troll me, because the next year I (completely unrelated) authored a paper on how translational selection (i.e., how well you match your host) cannot explain codon bias in many RNA viruses.
They also got basic things like the history of virus wrong, and characterized a bunch of mutations that were due to reassortment as single-base substitutions by using the 2009 pandemic strain as the reference sequence compared to the 1918 strain, and claimed a virus that was at the time of publication still circulating as extinct. So…yeah. Details here if anyone wants them. Disclaimer: that is one of my first videos so the quality sucks, but the information is good.
Okay so genetic entropy applies to RNA viruses, the fastest mutating entities on earth.
But then it doesn’t apply to bacteria, according to Rob Carter. Carter at least realizes the problem that bacteria pose - huge populations, relatively small genomes. But then he explains how because they have such huge populations and reproduce so fast, they can outrun genetic entropy, if you will. Which is correct! You can just do the popgen math on that and he’s right. But RNA viruses are that but more and they’re susceptible? But then elsewhere he’s said HIV isn’t, so it’s some viruses but not others…