Do you want to go on record as stating you think a human could be coded by 800 megabytes? That’s what we’re talking about if one invokes 100% functionality. My cell phone has 10 to 100 times more memory than that!
Alternatively, you could admit that using cell-phone capacity as a reason to reject genome utilisation is a ridiculous argument, that if valid would also refute your own views, retract your post and apologise for presenting something you hadn’t bothered to think about.
Oh, and you really ought to have a better grasp of your phone’s data capacity.
They do not, certainly not at the level implied by the formula. Further, the human population has been increasing for thousands of years (ever since the Flood, you might suppose), without all the modern technology.
What do those statistics show? Only that deleterious mutations exist. So what?
Sure. Why not? After all, it’s clear that a fugu must be, there being no more available in its genome. Is a human that much more complex?
Sal has stated more than once he only comes here to test out his rhetorical arguments against evolution for use in his “teaching evolution to YECs” class. He throws all sorts of crap against the wall to see what sticks. The goal isn’t to increase scientific understanding, it’s merely to get the best sciencey-sounding bafflegab to gull his Creationist students.
Good point. Next time Sal says something that could be refuted in seconds by a five-year-old, I might respond as if it’s a devastating argument and see if I can persuade him to use it on his students…
I have no trouble believing that a sufficiently short repeat is pathogenic. What I would want to see is evidence that intermediate mutations are very slightly deleterious and accumulating.
Could be? Don’t you think you need something more than mere speculation?
First, you need to support the assertion that the cell will only transcribe DNA that has function. Simply using transcription as evidence for function is extremely flawed since there is nothing in the process of transcription that checks for function before transcribing that section of DNA. There is no reason to expect transcription factors or RNA trascriptase to be so finely tuned as to only transcribe functional DNA.
The next challenge you have is to explain why DNA can have sequence specific function while accumulating mutations at a rate consistent with neutral drift. How is it that changing the sequence does not affect function?
No mystery here. Europeans, who had been exposed to the virus for a long time, had developed immune defense against it. Such wasn’t the case of the aboriginal populations.
And your observation doesn’t refute the positive correlation between virulence and fitness, quite the contrary.
It would appear that people have failed to factor in herd immunity when measuring change in the virulence of a pathogen over time.
How so? Why is a more virulent pathogen more fit? Which virus gets passed on more easily over time, one that kills the host population or one that leaves them alive?
But the most relevant feature regarding resistance to genetic entropy is arguably the number of mutations that occur per genome per generation. In the case of bacteria, it is equal to ~ 10^-3. In the case of RNA viruses, it is probably 1000 times higher.
“On the contrary?” Please spell out your logic. Would the virus instantly mutate when it infected an aboriginal person to become more “fit” i.e. virulent?
Hey Gilbert, life is over 3.5 billion years old. If you have a model that says life should have gone extinct in much less than that, the model is wrong. In all likelihood, the model is overly simple. The model may be able to generate curves that give a good fit to limited and short-term data because it is approximately correct on short timescales, in the same way Newtonian physics is approximately able to explain the trajectories of bullets and the movement of cars. But ultimately Newtonian physics gave way to Einstein’s because the models failed on much greater distances and much higher velocities. This same problem plagues Sanford’s simplistic model of the accumulation of deleterious mutations. It fails to explain the fact that life is incredibly ancient.
That doesn’t mean the model is right and we need to invent mYstErIoUs cAuSeS to explain life’s continued persistence. Just like Newtonian physics isn’t somehow still right and there are additional mysterious forces pushing around on objects when they move really fast or in very strong gravitational fields.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Sanford is wrong about the preponderance of deleterious mutations with very small fitness effects.
One way we know he is(in addition to life being ancient), is that he changes the subject away from fitness when we show examples of populations undergoing continued fitness increase, such as in the LTEE. Here Sanford suddenly changes the definition away from fitness and starts blathering about “the integrity of the information in the genome” and points to the fact that deletions are occurring and that genes not being used in the simple flask environment have become deleterious to carry around.
So Sanford has a model that conflicts with observation (fitness increases when he says it should decrease), so he invents an ad-hoc excuse to save it. Yet it’s not even a modification to his model. He has no math that accounts for the observed effect, he has a verbal excuse. Oh it’s still somehow evidence for GE because no-longer-used-genes are deteriorating.
Sanford’s model predicts that life should have gone extinct. It hasn’t. Therefore, Sanford’s model is wrong. That’s why it isn’t taken seriously by scientists. It reminds me of the scientists who said that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly because that is what their aerodynamics model showed.