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?
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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. »
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?
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.
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).
