Interesting you can’t / won’t address Rumraket’s critique of your claims at all and have to resort to snark to cover your inability to respond.
Er, what extant species descendants?
An interesting claim, coming from somebody who hasn’t dealt with pretty much anything I said, or any of the premises I presented, other than to quibble about my use of the term absolute fitness.
How can he be blamed for not knowing when you keep declining to say? I’d be curious to know on what basis you claim this knowledge yourself (i.e., the knowledge of why most biologists disagree). In fact, you seem to be stating that most biologists disagree for the same reasons, so how you could know that is also an interesting question I’ll look forward to hearing the answer to. I would wager that most biologists probably haven’t even studied Genetic Entropy enough to have an educated opinion on it. I don’t think most of them have even bothered to honestly read Dr Sanford’s book. Have you?
Brooks,
I agree these are interesting questions. I could certainly come up with some speculations for you, if you want–that seems to be what you’re asking for. But they would be nothing more than just-so stories, of the same kind that we so often see from evolutionists.
Do you believe that our inability to know for sure why each kind of animal happened to be buried at the point they did get buried, 4500 years after the fact and with extremely limited knowledge of the antediluvian world, somehow proves the Flood didn’t happen?
One more question: How complete do you believe our current knowledge of the fossil record really is? What percent of ALL fossils do you believe have been 1) discovered and 2) documented? Based on the answers to these questions, do you think it’s conceivable that new fossils could be discovered in the future that totally change the picture you just painted?
@PDPrice, not to put to fine a point on it, this was the topic of my dissertation. I’m extremely familiar with the literature.
Let me be more specific in terms of linear accumulation of deleterious mutations. According to Sanford, mutations have fixed fitness costs - they’re inherently beneficial or deleterious. Putting aside the problem with that, if mutations occur at approximately the same rate over time (true), how is it that in the universe of possible mutation, the frequency of deleterious mutations remains constant over time?
This is some of the math I’ve long asked creationists to explain, to no avail.
For anyone not familiar, Paul and I have had this conversation before, here and here. This is not the first he’s been asked this question.
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The figure is simply meant to explain a principle, which I would have expected any reasonable person to understand. The point is, as I said, that humans evolving from prokaryote does not have to entail that evolution should always be observed to yield continuous increases in whatever measure of function, or fitness, or information, you might have in mind. Thus, as it clearly does not follow that it should always do so, you can’t take the observation that one or more of these different quantities does not always increase to be confirmation of GE and evidence against evolution.
Neither Price nor Sanford has said anything that rebuts this elementary concept. Sanford will point to the distribution of fitness effects of mutations to argue that fitness should always be going down, but we have many examples where fitness is going up instead. Rather than accepting that this falsifies Sanford’s hypothesis, Sanford then changes the subject and starts talking about something that isn’t fitness instead, which Price has here (misleadingly and in my opinion very inappropriately) named “absolute fitness”, but which he has done no work to show how quantifiably relates to reproductive fitness.
Hence we are left with no actual evidence against evolution. It is entirely possible that the transition from prokaryotes to complex multicellular organisms involved many periods of losses of relative fitness, with gains in the numbers of genes, which then changed to periods of gains in relative fitness, with some loss in the number of genes, and everything in between. These different measures can go up and down in different proportions under different circumstances. It is totally conceivable that in some sense of comparative reproductive success, homo sapiens are less reproductively fit than bacteria are, yet have a bigger genome with more information and more functional genes.
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Well, I do believe it, whether or not @gbrooks9 does. The fossil record sure does look like a very long series that tells a consistent story. Cambrian fossils are not mixed with Permian fossils, and Permian fossils aren’t mixed with Cretaceous ones, and Cretaceous ones aren’t mixed with Miocene ones. The record is at least complete enough to tell us that. Index fossils are reliable guides to stratigraphy. Why? Both terrestrial and marine sediments occur at all stratigraphic levels. Why? And so on.
But the first question is what you think the rock record shows at the most basic level. Which rocks were laid down before, which during, and which after the flood? How do you know? Or if you don’t know, why not?
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I would assume he means that the impossibility of a flood of any description causing things to be buried in a manner consistent with how they are found proves that it didn’t happen.
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If that’s the case, you should already know the answers to the questions you’re asking me.
That’s true, at least in terms of absolute fitness. Reproductive fitness can be contextualized such that you can occasionally have “reductive evolution”, but this is not helpful in any long-term Darwinian sense.
This is very simple to explain, and evolutionists have already explained it for you:
“Even the simplest of living organisms are highly complex. Mutations—indiscriminate
alterations of such complexity—are much more likely to be harmful than beneficial.”
Gerrish, P., et al., Genomic mutation rates that neutralize adaptive evolution and natural selection,
J. R. Soc. Interface, 29 May 2013; DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2013.0329.
There are many, many orders of magnitude more ways to break a functioning machine than there are ways to improve upon it. This is exactly why engineering is a discipline, and not a series of happy accidents.
For anyone not familiar, Paul and I have had this conversation before, here and here. This is not the first he’s been asked this question.
Seeing as how that’s the case, this gives us further insight into your claims that you have allegedly never been able to get any answers to these questions. 
No. It is overwhelming evidence that most of the life on earth did not share the planet at the same time.
Don’t speak in generalities. Address the specific evidence that was presented, and the specific premises of the argument that was made. You have done none of that. Which of the premises do you dispute? They are all well-attested from the literature.
If a species is well adapted to a constant environment and is at or very near to a local fitness peak sure there are more ways to reduce fitness than improve it further. But in the real world environments aren’t constant. They are constantly changing and moving the local fitness peaks which means a species then has viable pathways to improve fitness and move to the new peaks.
YECs really should try dealing with the actual physical world sometime and not the fantasy version residing in their heads.
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The impossibility of a flood of any description causing things to be buried as we find them? Are you sure the word ‘impossible’ means what you think it does? You’re placing an ‘impossible’ burden of proof upon yourself.
You do realize that just a single out-of-place fossil does not merely harm your paradigm, it obliterates it. You do realize that I hope. Just ONE.
Why did you add this? How does it help your side of the argument?
Nothing about any of that would indicate there was no global Flood.
I really don’t think it’s anything of the kind. Stratification would be expected as a result of a global flood. We can certainly, at bare minimum, say that both creationists and evolutionists are perfectly capable of accommodating the idea of stratification in their models. This in turn means that the existence of stratification doesn’t really prove anything either way in terms of this question.
Nothing about any of that would indicate there was no global Flood.
I would direct you to consult:
I do indeed.
You are providing a general answer to a specific question.
Let me ask again, using an analogy this time.
I have 100 lights that can be either red or green, and they randomly change back and forth at a constant rate. Right now, 90 are green, and 10 are red. From that specific state, how frequently will a green light turn red? 90% of the time.
But what if 10 light turn red. Now there are 80 green lights and 20 red lights. In this new state, how frequently will a green light turn red? Now it’s about 80% of the time. What if it’s 50/50? Now they switch back and forth at equal frequency.
Follow?
My point is that if every mutation is either “green” or “red”, then as “red” mutations occur, the frequency of potential “red” mutations declines. So “red” mutations do not accumulate in a linear fashion.
The answer to this problem is that there isn’t an answer; Sanford is just wrong.
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ALL the physical evidence from geology, physics, paleontology, genetics shows a literal Noah’s Flood 4500 years ago never happened. Ignoring all that data doesn’t make the data go away. Neither does the disingenuous hand-wave “different interpretation”.
Still waiting for you to explain how what we see in the sequenced genomes of extinct species going back 700,000 years fits your GE scenario. But you have no explanation, do you? 
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Extant species which are the descendants of now extinct species. I could have worded that better.