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…
If anyone is interested in my Panda’s Thumb article addressing the allegedly debunked “1% myth,” you can read it here:
As I already mentioned, Luskin is so thoroughly dismantled by Dan and Erika that my article feels like beating a dead horse. But perhaps it is still interesting.
Personally I want as many people beating every creationist horse possible. They’re all zombie horses at this point. And I think I’ve stretched the metaphor far enough for one day.
My goodness, without my even trying all that hard, The Panda’s Thumb taught me something that is probably “old news” to most of you but was new to me:
According to YOO et al. (2025), chimpanzees exhibit a genetic diversity of 8.8% within their own species. Even more striking: gorilla genomes differ from one another by up to 13.8%—within the same species!
Even worse: If you consider only the gap divergence (without SNV differences), as is the case in the Nature paper, you end up with a 13.3% difference between chimps and humans—which is actually lower than the genetic variability found in gorillas!
Let the games begin. They begin below the fold with a shout out to Mr. Luskin. You really gotta wonder just how far evangelicalism has drifted into the wilderness when someone like William Lane Craig is considered heretical…
I don’t know anything about “stream.org”, but that linked page is surely wrong.
I remember questioning it as a young Christian at around 12 years of age. That would be 74 years ago, but perhaps that still counts as “recently”.
I did not question it because of the science. I questioned it because of the literary genre. It read more like an ancient fable than like history. Yes, I did wonder what it is about evangelicals, that they cannot tell the difference.
Yup, a bunch of people said this would happen. That’s the whole point for Luskin and DI. Everyone on “their side” now has a new talking point, accuracy be damned. That makes the lying worth it. One might say this is the 30 pieces of silver.
.Looks like lot of strugglin’ goin’ on. But those “critics” don’t appear to be listed. To whom in the world is Luskin referring? These guys at the DI are like the EverReady Bunny. Or the old Timex ads–takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’…
As usual, Casey fails to address the claims of his critics and resorts to misrepresenting them in the process. Do IDers get professional instruction in losing the capacity for shame?
Their shamelessness would be of no consequence if their followers were not so gullible. Say what you will about the DI, but they do know their audience.
I always assumed that it came as part and parcel of being an apologist – the view that, if you’re ‘winning souls for Jesus’, you need have no shame in “lying for Jesus” to achieve that aim. That the divinely ordained end justifies any means.
After all, compared with Christianity’s long history of Conversion by the Sword, what does a bit of dishonesty here and there matter?
We have been hammering away at all this. For instance, I’ve written that in light of a Trump Administration move to weed out ideological bias at the Smithsonian, bad science like the mindlessly echoed “98.9%” figure should be fixed too. I’ve also noted that all these figures vastly understate the true gap between humans and chimps. That gap can’t be calculated from the physical genome, as I explain in my new book about the thinking of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.
If the difference between humans and chimps “can’t be calculated from the physical genome,” then why do Klinghoffer and his friends have their panties in such knots over this? The answer has already been provided in our discussion here.
(I will only further take note that the DI have reached the point where they have to write books about each other to keep the publications flowing.
Do they think anyone is buying the “we’re not trying to undermine human-chimp common ancestry, we swear” line? How dumb do they think their readers are?
I don’t know a single creationist who would say “we’re still related to monkeys, we’re just more different than first thought” would somehow help human exceptionalism. To them, especially in America, “I didn’t come from no monkey” is THE emotional undercurrent behind this.
