SFT: On Genetic Entropy

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@PDPrice

Then you agree with Dr. Sanford on this point. But please don’t play dumb: everything we know about mutations, both from theory and from practice, shows they are overwhelmingly damaging.

I’m sorry, but stating the truth is not playing dumb. Everything we know about mutations, and we know quite a lot, tells us that (for example) in ~90% of the human genome the precise sequence doesn’t matter at all. There may be tiny efficiency differences to some sequence configurations, but they’re negligible; if you changed every base in that part of the genome, you’d still have a perfectly functional human that was indistinguishable from others. Sanford is simply wrong.

@PDPrice

That means that your above statement is very revealing, because you just admitted that the vast majority of mutations are not selectable . The usual story (just as told by Darwin himself) is that we can account for the greatness of our own biological design by the subtle working of natural selection over eons. But the truth is uglier: most of what’s going on is drift…in other words, the completely unguided piling on of haphazard accidental changes.

Stripping away the tendentious language: yes, the neutral theory of evolution is largely correct, and most genetic variation and change in organisms like humans is selectively neutral and almost all of it is unimportant for biology. This is a standard part of evolutionary theory.

@PDPrice

You’re trying to use a version of the ‘god of the gaps’ argument, but in this case it’s ‘beneficial mutations of the gaps’. You know it, I know it.

Just an observation that may help you in the future: as far as I can tell, every time you say something like ‘You know, I know it’, you’re wrong.

@PDPrice

Real biology offers next to no support for the idea of beneficial mutations

This is a tangent from the current discussion, but it’s also wrong – utterly, even hilariously wrong, Seriously, do you have any idea how ridiculous it is telling someone who’s spent decades studying beneficial mutations that they don’t exist?

I’ve deleted most of the rest, since it’s nothing but a continued repetition of your claims, still without any evidence to support them. Except for this:

@PDPrice

That’s incorrect. Case studies are difficult because of the timescale involved, but one such study has been completed by Carter and Sanford themselves, and published.

Genetic Entropy

OK, I did. Let’s discuss the only evidence I’ve seen presented in any of the articles I’ve examined: [image] What data are graphed here? Specifically and in your own words, please.