From your reference: “Under these more realistic conditions, the fitness decline due to Muller’s ratchet can be cancelled out or even reversed by beneficial mutations, resulting in unchanging or increasing fitness.”
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Stratification, and segregation of hundreds of thousands of fossils, would be expected as a result of a single flood? That is just a bazaar statement.
What extant species are descended from mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and dire wolves? I don’t think you’ve thought this through.
I quoted what I did to answer a specific question that was asked. That doesn’t imply I agree with every conclusion in the entire paper. What relevance does your quote have to the question that I was specifically answering? Absolutely none.
Producing the observed geology with a single global flood is like trying to bake a cake with a shotgun. You just can’t produce the observed results with that mechanism. You can say you’ve matched ‘some’ aspects of the result, but every time you match one you make everything else worse.
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No, I don’t realize that. Your stance is known in the trade as “naive falsificationism”. One datum can’t overrule thousands of data. But what out-of-place fossil did you have in mind?
How do terrestrial sediments form in the middle of a worldwide flood? How do you explain the interspersing of terrestrial and marine sediments in a flood context? The fossil record is often explained by flood fans as rising waters flooding different ecosystems, and/or as more mobile organisms fleeing to high ground. Neither of these is compatible with the observation of terrestrial and marine sediments at all levels.
Please explain how a flood is compatible with those observations.
OK, so you would put the beginning of the flood somewhere in the Archaean and the end somewhere in the Pliocene. Is that correct? But how do you know that? What separates geology in the Pliocene from geology in the Miocene? I see no significant boundary at which the sorts of rock change radically. Pliocene and Miocene rocks generally look about the same to me, the same mix of coarse- and fine-grained, high- and low-energy, silicates and carbonates, etc. And should there not be a period immediately post-flood in which there are no fossils at all, while the planet is repopulated with species?
Also, I’d be interested in your explanation for biotic succession in the record. Why does the Cambrian look quite a bit like the Ordovician, less like the Silurian, and still less like the Carboniferous, etc.? Why is there such a radical change at the K/T boundary, with a convenient Chicxulub crater and a worldwide boundary clay? So much is incompatible with your story, and I’ve only mentioned a very few things that happened to come to mind immediately.
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No, it isn’t bazaar. The flood didn’t just drop down all at once from the sky. The waters progressively rose, reached an apex, and then progressively subsided. This process creates stratification.
This analogy is so hopelessly oversimplified with respect to the real genome that it serves no purpose other than to confuse and distract. For one thing, the genome is not a series of binary switches. Each site has 4 options, not two. In addition, mutations are not random, but favor certain positions over others. This means that back mutations are inherently unlikely to happen (notwithstanding the problem of having lightning strike the exact same spot twice by chance).
And all of this ignores the problem of context. The genome is not a series of unrelated switches. Damaging one part of the information in the genome has splash-damage type effects all across the organism, exactly as a document becomes progressively less and less readable the more times you introduce new typos into it. Epistasis is a major problem for evolution, since damaging mutations can multiply their effects in combination, and even “helpful” ones can cancel one another out (antagonistic epistasis). I explained that already in one of your posted links to Reddit.
This was already addressed. You’re asking me to come up with a just-so story. I could do it, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Whether we know the answers to your questions, or whether we don’t, they have no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the historical Flood.
I too cannot agree with the below.
This statement is going to be challenged even by evolutionary biologists. What does he give to support this claim?
I suppose if you merely assert something, that makes it true and unquestionable.
The examples I gave of extinct species whose genomes have been sampled were not offered as the examples of extinct species whose descendants are alive today. For example
World’s Oldest Genome Sequenced From 700,000-Year-Old Horse DNA
The Pleistocene horse genome Orlando and colleagues pieced together helped them determine that the ancestor to the Equus lineage—the group that gave rise to modern horses, zebras, and donkeys—arose 4 to 4.5 million years ago, or about two million years earlier than previously thought. (Learn more about the evolution of horses.)
The ancient horse genome also allowed the team to determine the evolutionary relationship between modern domestic horses and the endangered Przewalski’s horse, a native to the Mongolian steppes that represents the last living breed of wild horse.
Normally you might be right, but in this case you are wrong. Your paradigm establishes the constraints so tightly that it actually paints you into a corner. This time – really and truly – just ONE out-of-place index fossil completely destroys your paradigm.
Since in your model one ‘earlier life form’ must give way to a ‘later life form’ you have no argument left if a ‘later form’ is found mixed in an ‘earlier form’. The debate ends abruptly, and not in your favor.
You’re still ignoring the huge amount of genetic evidence we have going back 700,000 years. Why can’t you show signs of “genetic entropy” in any of those samples?
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I think I know what is going on with this statement. The author is not making claim per se, he is simply making an “if” “then” proposal. In other words,
“If beneficial mutations could exist in number, then fitness decline could theoretically be cancelled our or even reversed.”
He is not stating that such a thing is true, but rather, give a hypothetical “if it could be true”.
I missed it. Could you at least direct me to the relevant post?
Well of course they do. Standard science has a simple explanation for the observations and you have none. Why should anyone accept that your claims are true?
Rather than argue about your misunderstanding of science, why not get into specifics? What out of place index fossil are you referring to?
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My initial response to @gbrooks9, right here. And by the way, it was a post that should never have been made here to begin with, as it is off-topic.
Both creationists and evolutionists look at the fossil record with their own preconceived ideas and interpret it from there. Both interpretive frameworks encounter unanswered questions and anomalies. Our knowledge as human beings is limited, and as such unanswered questions to not amount to any kind of refutation. The question shouldn’t be, “why can’t you explain everything about the fossil record?” The question is, via abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation), what is the most reasonable conclusion given the evidence we have? There is no question that the fossil record is best explained by a very large global Flood event, and not by gradualism.
Yes, they were, though you may not have intended to do so.
Not clear what this is supposed to be an example of. If it’s of an ancient species whose descendants are alive today, you are incorrect. If it’s of an ancient species, period, then fine. I don’t think you can find an example of an ancient species with extant descendants. For various reasons, it’s nearly impossible to know that. Cool story though; this must be among the oldest sequenced genomes.
I think I know what is going on with this statement. The author is not making a claim per se, he is simply making an “if” “then” proposal. In other words,
“If beneficial mutations could exist in number, then fitness decline could theoretically be cancelled out or even reversed.”
He is not stating that such a thing is true, but rather, offers a hypothetical “if it could be true”.
That is a good question. The right response is to:
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Acknowledge that you don’t know.
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Assure us that you want to know.
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Use the search function of the forum or google to find out what some of have already written about this.
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Ask us questions to help clarify your understanding.
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Put the debates on ice for a bit till you have a good handle on what we are saying.
After some work, even though you are still YEC and agree with Sanford, you might be able to say, “You disagree with Sanford for X, Y and Z reasons, is that correct?” We would respond, “Yeah that is a good explanation of at least part of the reasons why we disagree.”
Now, at that point, we could move forward with a sensible conversation about whether or not X, Y and Z are valid reasons for our skepticism or not.
That, it seems, is the only possible way for there to be some progress here.
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