SFT: On Genetic Entropy

[CrisprCAS9]

@Timothy_Horton

Also there’s a joke in there somewhere about trees and The Fall

Then you should have said Ophidia instead of Cetacea.

[dsterncardinale]

As I described above, either the effects of mutations are constant, in which case the frequencies (of fitness effects) necessarily change, or the frequencies remain constant, which requires the effects to be variable. Dr. Sanford tries to have it both ways by assuming constant effects for each mutation, and constant frequency of deleterious mutations.

[sfmatheson (Stephen Matheson)]

@Timothy_Horton

Also there’s a joke in there somewhere about trees and The Fall…

The trees mated with the Nephilim. I thought everyone knew this. Didn’t y’all go to Sunday School?

[Timothy_Horton]

@sfmatheson

The trees mated with the Nephilim. I thought everyone knew this. Didn’t y’all go to Sunday School?

Is that where the expression “sporting wood” derives?

[BrushyCanyon (Supercritical Geoscientist)]

Greetings, f-g!
Perhaps our YEC friends can expound on the truly exquisite stratigraphy of forams? These little critters have inhabited the oceans since the Cambrian.

These organisms are typically about the size of the period at the end of these sentence, and just about every taxa has very similar size ranges and hydrodynamic properties: they settle down in the water column at the same rate.

For over a century geologists have identified very specific biostratigrapical foram zones by statistically analyzing the relative ratios of different foram species in rock samples, often from drilling chips recovered from miles beneath the surface.

These objective, statistically significant assemblages extend over hundreds of miles in ancient marine basins, and can be tested by anyone with a microscope and a bag of drill cuttings (no assumptions required).

How can any one-year"flood" create these sequences from organisms with the same settling rates?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

So, there is a lot of off topic responses in this thread. Please be more disciplined about starting new threads for new topics.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@dsterncardinale

As those deleterious mutations occur, the number of possible subsequent deleterious mutations decreases, and the number of possible neutral and/or beneficial mutations increases. Ignoring selection, eventually such a sequence will reach equilibrium, at which point deleterious mutations will no longer net increase.

Is this what is behind your assumptions?

[Timothy_Horton]

@colewd

Is this what is behind you assumptions?

Logic and reality.

[dsterncardinale]

Those are Dr. Sanford’s assumptions.

[BrushyCanyon (Supercritical Geoscientist)]

Sorry Joshua,

I just have a 40-year habit of trying to clarify geological reality.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

A lot of people are off topic. Please do clarify, but let’s try and keep threads more organized.

[Mr_Wilford]

Can we split this into a new topic? I’ve seen a single creationist article discussing this Id like to share.

[gbrooks9 (GeorgeB)]

@PDPrice

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

Sure… it is conceivable. But based on the theory of large numbers, it doesn’t seem likely.

What i see in your answer is you have no idea how to explain why all the biggest reptiles drowned before the mammals with limited swimming abilities:

Cows, sheep, goats, bears, camels, giraffe…

[faded_Glory]

As a now-retired petroleum geoscientist I am well aware. I doubt if our YEC friends have ever heard of them.

[John_Harshman]

It’s somewhat on-topic, as the whole Genetic Entropy model assumes both a 6000-year-old creation and a 4000-year-old global flood. It’s that attack on basic assumptions that you see in that AiG cartoon. This whole genetic entropy thing can’t possibly be true absent those assumptions, and the problems with them are even more glaringly obvious than the problems with their biology.

[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?

[dsterncardinale]

Okay, so you’re making a different argument from the one Dr. Sanford makes. One that (correctly) recognizes that the fitness effects of mutations are not constant. Great!

But going back for one moment, using your HOUSEHOLD example, is it not the case that the probability of a back mutation increases with each “forward” mutation that occurs? That’s a simple question, and we should all be able to agree on the answer. The fitness effects of such mutations are a separate question (one that I alluded to earlier, when I said “Once you can explain how this problem isn’t actually a problem for the idea of genetic entropy, we can get into the more granular questions of mutational biases and epistatic interactions, if you want.”).

[r_speir]

@John_Harshman

as the whole Genetic Entropy model assumes both a 6000-year-old creation

Question for @PDPrice. Evolution as Harshman above reminds us demands extremely long periods of times to accomplish. For the move from primates to modern humans (which by the way I totally disagree with) we are talking about roughly 2 millions years. What has genetic entropy concluded about such protracted periods of mutations? I thought one point that Sanford had said something like, “given GE, the human race would be basically non-existent”.

[PDPrice (Paul Price)]

@dsterncardinale

Okay, so you’re making a different argument from the one Dr. Sanford makes.

No, not a different argument. Sanford’s argument remains sound, but this is simply a reply to this inaccurate analogy of point mutations and back mutations.

recognizes that the fitness effects of mutations are not constant. Great!

I don’t think anybody is claiming that mutational effects are irrespective of their informational context, and this certainly doesn’t improve your position. Rather, the issue is the DFE: the distribution of fitness effects. And there’s simply no question about it: the vast majority of all mutations are damaging, not helpful, and that is explained in as much detail as you might like in the literature, or in as little detail as you like by using simple common sense.

But going back for one moment, using your HOUSEHOLD example, is it not the case that the probability of a back mutation increases with each “forward” mutation that occurs?

A little bit, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that the meaning: HOUSEHOLD, gets lost. This is obviously an oversimplified example. The genome is much more complex than the English language. How much devastation do you imagine a genome can tolerate and still be viable? For every one back mutation you might possibly get, you will have gotten countless other damaging forward mutations. That’s the problem. Your math is not working out here.

[T.j_Runyon]

@r_speir

2 millions years.

How did you come up with that number?