Ratio of Beneficial Mutations to Others

Good point. It’s one thing for Sanford to claim that genetic entropy could be true given enough wiggle-room in biology, it’s quite another for him to suggest that it invalidates the copious physical evidence for life being ancient, from radiometric dating to geophysics.

1 Like

Graur’s work shows that it can. If the rate of deleterious mutations matches the rate of natural selection removing them from the genome then they will be at equilibrium. This is found in his calculations for the number of children a couple needs to have and how many of those offspring need to survive and have offspring of their own. For humans, if the percentage of functional DNA in the human genome is 10-15% then the number of offspring needed per person is less than 1.8 which is completely doable.

If anyone needs more evidence Sanford is a completely off the rails YEC nutter consider his leadership in this YEC group

​Logos Research Associates

About LogosRA

As Ambassadors for Christ we seek to encourage others to believe in Jesus, to faithfully and deliberately believe what Jesus taught, and to believe God’s revealed Word – the Gospel – which is the power of God to salvation. We use scholarship, logic, and the scientific method to show that the historical claims of the Bible are not only credible, but are superior to evolutionary theory to explain the origin of the world we see. We freely acknowledge our own fallibility, the inherent limits of “historical science”, and the need for “faith” by adherents of any view about ultimate origins. We urge all people to NOT put their faith in us, or any other form of human authority, but ultimately to put their faith in Jesus Christ.

LRA is a veritable rogue’s gallery of well known anti-science YECs including John Baumgardner, Steve Austin, Jerry Bergman, David Coppedge, Russel Humphreys, Paul Nelson, Larry Vardiman, and others.

Check out Sanford’s “Biology” Powerpoint presentation in their Teaching Points section. Sanford argues for Biblical created “kinds” which can’t evolve into other “kinds” and that humans are an entire separate kingdom of life (plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human kingdom). That site has some military grade woo there folks. :astonished:

What do you think then of the comment below by Maynard V Olson in Science where he argues that one of the lesson of the human genome project is that it must have existed a wild type human genome but that we all fall short of this platonic ideal in our own distinctive way. This lesson is very consistent with Sanford’s thesis regarding genetic entropy, isn’t it?
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/331/6019/872.3.full

It isn’t.

Sanford’s hypothesis predicts that we would find more ideal genomes as we go back in time. We haven’t, and more importantly, Sanford isn’t the one looking for data with the potential to falsify his hypothesis. He, and you, are doing pseudoscientific cherry-picking.

3 Likes

What gives you the impression that Olson believes an “ideal” human genome ever actually existed in nature?

1 Like

No. It is expected that every species will carry deleterious mutations called a mutational load, and that is what Olson is talking about. Sanford is saying something else. Sanford is saying that the mutational load will necessarily increase over time, and that isn’t supported by any data or observations.

I think you completely dodged the question of the earlier sequenced human genomes. Are you also a YEC and claim as Sanford does the Earth and all life on it is only 6000 years old?

I agree that most of those associated with LRA have isolated themselves from the scientific community and have lost the thread of good scientific discourse, based on what I hear the scientific community saying.

At the same time, I agree with three out of the four sentences in the LRA statement. Prudence would suggest that you not associate Christian faith with bad science, as the Christians who do good science far outnumber those who have isolated themselves from the scientific community.

Thanks,
Chris

Their statement reminds me a lot of Flat Earthers:

It seems to be a common thread among conspiracy theorists to describe themselves as using the “true science” and that only they have the truth. As I have often said, these types of groups are much more interesting if you look through the eyes of a psychologist.

I don’t now and never have.

Absolutely agree.

1 Like

N[quote=“davecarlson, post:155, topic:6179”]

What do you think then of the comment below by Maynard V Olson in Science where he argues that one of the lesson of the human genome project is that it must have existed a wild type human genome but that we all fall short of this platonic ideal in our own distinctive way.

What gives you the impression that Olson believes an “ideal” human genome ever actually existed in nature?
[/quote]

See the relevant passage below:

« A model for human genetic individuality is emerging in which there actually is a “wild-type” human genome—one in which most genes exist in an evolutionarily optimized form. »

What about this study showing that the mutation load has increased in humans over the past 45 0000 years?

I am unable to do this analysis, but I’ll bet you that when it will be done, we will see a more degraded genome in modern human than in Otzi. In support of this, see the post above (162).

The paper is specifically about increasing genetic load in Europeans, not all humans. The fact that the mutation load in Europeans may have increased over time isn’t particularly surprising given that Europeans emerged out of Africa in a series of bottlenecks and range expansions.
African populations, on the other hand, have a lesser mutational load, as expected:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/4/E440

This not only supports the OOA theory of human diversification, but also shows that even over large timescales (45,000 years), “genetic entropy” doesn’t do nearly as much damage as Sanford suggests. Even in a YEC conception, some of those ancient genomes included the study must have been very early post-flood (or even pre-flood) humans, right?

5 Likes

Yes, and then he goes on to say, rightly, that no human genome actually exhibits the platonic ideal. He certainly doesn’t say that it existed at any point in the past.

2 Likes

How does that support Sanford who claims humans with perfect genomes were created only 6000 years ago?

1 Like

Why hasn’t Sanford or any of the other “genetic entropy” LRA crew done this analysis and published the results?

What about the 700,000 year old horse DNA? Why haven’t horses gone extinct yet?

2 Likes

Here is a plot of the lifespan of patriarchs vs. the year they were born starting with setting Adam at year 0:

For the YEC, the flood is particularly significant because it is after this that God says that mankind’s age will be limited to 120 years. So this means that ‘Genetic Entropy’ doesn’t start with the fall but rather it starts after Noah’s flood even though most YEC also argue that bad things could start happening to our genome after the fall.

Why is Shem included in the Biological Decay Curve?
Anyways let’s just look at the portion after the flood and we can ask why did Sanford include Shem? Shem was born after God supernaturally started up his genetic entropy thing which didn’t happen at the fall but after the flood. I think I know why someone would include, Shem- it gives a much nicer looking curve! I think Sanford also included Noah which I didn’t realize until after. Funny enough though my model predicted that Noah’s age should have been 1200 years when he died if genetic entropy started then.

Let’s include Shem for fun anyways

Anyways let’s just include Shem because it makes for a nicer graph. See the data point around 600 in Sanford’s graph (that’s Shem):

In my graph I went up to Joseph but it looks like Sanford has many more people beyond that (i.e. I guess that could be Moses and Joshua (?) around 400 years after Joseph. And then we have another 400 years after that and what does the graph end at… Jesus? Or maybe that’s the average life expectancy in Rome or something. Let me put that on the end of my graph too (since it increases the R-squared value) and do an expontential decay fit which @Giltil said was the curve:

Note: that’s an actual exponential fit. If we don’t include Shem it gets much worse. None the less, if we try other curve fitting that isn’t exponential we get something like this:

That’s about the best one is going to get. Note that the best fit for Sanford isn’t an exponential fit but some arbitrary inverse power law, i.e. 1/(the centuries born after Noah to the 1.4th power). That is perhaps one of the most absurd things I’ve ever seen plotted or best fit lines I’ve ever seen created. It has insanely bizarre axes, a nonsensical power law, the assumption that all of the ages of a single patriarch are representative of the entire human population, and it tries to pass off as an impressive fit (to what? God only knows).

9 Likes

That is a false claim, as we have shown more recently.

This also is false. They did not examine any H1N1 isolates to the present. They stopped in 2012.

Guess what–because they weren’t looking at what you claimed they were looking at, it does not agree with the predictions.