SFT: On Genetic Entropy

[PDPrice (Paul Price)]

@CrisprCAS9

If you have 1000 loci in a perfectly adapted population, you have 3000 possible deleterious mutations, ignoring indels and assuming no loci have multiple ‘best’ alleles, and 0 possible beneficial mutations. If you mutate one, you have 1 possible beneficial mutation, 2997 possible deleterious mutations, and 2 mutations that may be either beneficial, neutral, or deleterious. So to take the worst case, you would at least increase the relative proportion of beneficial mutations from 0% to 0.03%. Which is an increase.

I’m responding to both you and @dsterncardinale together, since you’re both essentially saying the same thing from what I can tell. This is a re-hash of arguments that have been had previously on Reddit. I posted this, in response to the ‘back mutations’ claim:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Creation/comments/euzput/lets_explain_compound_probabilities_as_they/

…showing that back mutations are incredibly unlikely (and this is even granting the unrealistic parameter of random mutations). When you add in that factor, the likelihood drops much further.

But there’s more. You’re arguing that as the amount of mutations increases, the number of possible “back mutations” also increases. And I’ve responded to that idea before as well. In one sense, you could say it is technically true (but irrelevant), as I stated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Creation/comments/euzput/lets_explain_compound_probabilities_as_they/fft6mp7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

“That’s true, the chance does go up as the genome gets more degenerated from previous mutations. But that is little consolation compared to all the damage that’s getting done to the genome in the first place.”

And I think we can go even further than this. Because really, if that much mutation has happened, then a lot of the informational context of those loci has now been lost, which means that the ‘back mutations’ will not be beneficial! Let me give you an example:

HOUSEHOLD

Mutation 1:

BOUSEHOLD

(One possible back mutation).

If you get lucky (really lucky) and back-mutate this before any further mutations happen, then we get our original word back. In turn, that would be “beneficial”. Certainly not in an information-building sense, but at least in an information-restoring sense.

But in reality, most mutations are not back mutations. So let’s say after many more mutations, we have

BOUTNHELDE

Now, our original back mutation would give us:

HOUTNHELDE

Which clearly fails to restore the proper meaning. As such, this back mutation missed its window of being “beneficial”.

At best, all back mutations can do is restore previous information that had been lost. There’s more discussion of this at: What would count as 'new information' in genetics?