I don’t know what point you’re making, sorry. Could you clarify?
This same question keeps getting asked
How do you explain the 700,000 years of genetic data we have which shows NO “genetic entropy”
…and keeps getting cowardly run from.
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Okay so you don’t dispute the math, only that it’s relevant. Great.
In “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome”, Sanford is very clear. He lays out a number of premises that underly his model. One of them is that deleterious mutations accumulate in an approximately linear fashion over generations.
Any problem with that?
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Ok I will take a stab at an answer. The 700,000 years you claim is bogus.
Demonstrate the ages of all the sequenced genomes are bogus. Don’t just make empty hand waves.
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No problem. The issue of back mutations you’re bringing up here is totally irrelevant, for all the reasons I already explained. In any real world scenario, it would never have any real impact on the DFE (which is why I’ve never seen, to my recollection, any real paper on the DFE that even so much as considers back mutations!). Since back mutations are context-dependent, many of them will cease to be beneficial once the surrounding information has also been degraded.
I would not consider mice, fruit flies, or paramecia to be “simple organisms”. Why would you? And that article was entirely about bacteria.
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I don’t want to. I am trying to listen to a real and relevant discussion right now. For instance
No, it wasn’t. And many of these same principles apply. Simpler genomes mean less genetic entropy, since simpler genomes will have a smaller fraction of nearly-neutrals in the DFE. Organisms with fast generation times can also sustain much higher amounts of purifying selection than could ever be sustained by higher life forms, and they often have fewer mutations per generation, meaning it’s easier to weed out the mutations when they do occur.
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You can’t. No YEC can. That’s why they always flee from the evidence they can’t explain.
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I have explained what is wrong with the GE idea perfectly well. No reason to repeat myself. Reproductive fitness does not equal this thing you call “absolute fitness”. It is possible that one can go up while the other goes down, and the reverse. Hence the conclusion you are seeking to establish logically cannot be supported by the premises. And that is all I need to point out. Your conclusion doesn’t follow.
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This is what I wrote earlier:
The somewhat apocryphal story of the miraculous flight of the bumble bee can serve as a good lesson here. As the story goes, engineers built a computer model of bumble bee flight and according to the model the bumble bee should not be able to fly. So is bumble bee flight a supernatural miracle, or is their model wrong? Obviously, when a model contradicts reality it is the model that is wrong, not reality. Genetic Entropy (GE) is the bumble bee flight model. We have mountains of evidence demonstrating that GE doesn’t happen. Even within the time frame of young Earth creationism we should still be seeing the extinction of species with short generation times, and that isn’t happening.
However, it may still be worth taking GE at face value and working through it. Without digging too far into GE, there seems to be some major problems with the assumptions in the basic model.
- Slightly deleterious mutations that selection can’t see will add up to big losses in fitness.
- The loss in fitness for each additional slightly deleterious mutation is linear.
- The rate of slightly beneficial mutations is zero.
- The rate of deletion mutations and reverse mutations is lower than the rate of slightly deleterious mutations.
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I addressed this claim in the debate itself. They are not the same thing, but they are connected by the underlying genetics. The conclusion definitely follows from the premises, and you apparently don’t want to challenge any of the premises.
Most if not all of the ancient species we’ve sequenced going back 700,000 years don’t have simpler genomes or fast generation times.
That data isn’t going away no matter how much you pretend it doesn’t exist. Having you continue to run from it shows how indefensible your GE claims are quite nicely though. 
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Why would you imagine that mice, fruit flies, and paramecia have simpler genomes than humans?
No, organisms with very large populations and greater numbers of offspring can sustain higher amounts of purifying selection. This often correlates with fast generation times, but it’s not the same thing.
You presumably refer to fewer cell generations per individual generation, which is certainly true for single-celled organisms, but not so much for multicellular ones.
Nor are the population sizes or the mutation rates different enough to match the differences in generation times. Insects should be mostly extinct, or at least coughing up blood, by now under your notion. So should most rodents. And so on.
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Do you seriously dispute that it takes more functional information to create a human than it does to create any of those things you just listed?
Okay, great.
So taking your HOUSEHOLD example, initially, what’s the probability of a back mutation? Zero, because it’s in the “initial” state (Sanford assumes an optimal or near-optimal initial state, which is its own problem, but not relevant here).
What about BOUSEHOLD? Le’s treat this like a DNA sequence with four states per site, to make it easy. Instead of HOUSEHOLD, we start with AAAAAAAAAA. I’m using 10 characters instead of 9 to make the math easier.
If we start with AAAAAAAAAA, and experience a mutation to GAAAAAAAAA, then the probability of a back mutation is now 1/30, up from 0/30. But let’s say a different mutation occurs. Now we have GAAAAATAAA. Now the probability of a back mutation is 1/15. But another new mutation occurs. and another. GCATAATAAA. Back mutation probability? 2/15, or better than 1/8.
And then you have to consider the declining frequencies of possible deleterious mutations. In the above example, it starts at 30/30, declines to, at best, 29/30, and so on down as more mutations occur. By the time the four mutations shown above have occurred, it’s just 13/15. And this is assuming zero neutral sites, which, I hope we can all agree, is not just unreasonable, but completely insane.
So, are deleterious mutations accumulating in a linear fashion, or does the frequency decrease over time as they accumulate? There’s only one correct answer here, whether you’re dealing with 10 bases or 3 billion. What’s that answer?
The GE premise that all animals were created with “perfect” genomes only 6000 years ago was scientifically disproven when we began studying genetics over 70 years ago. Of course a 6000 year old Earth was disproven by Christian geologists over two centuries ago. But don’t let ugly facts stand in the way of your pretty GE fantasy.
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That is wrong on many counts. A much higher fraction of bacterial genomes are functional compared to eukaryotes which means a much lower fraction of mutations will be neutral. Perhaps more importantly, bacteria are asexual which increases the rate at which they will accumulate deleterious mutations, a process called Muller’s Ratchet.
If GE is true, then bacteria should have disappeared off the face of the Earth a long time ago. Remember, we are talking about the accumulation of deleterious mutations whose effect is small enough that selection can’t see them, so purifying selection can’t enter into it.
One of the problems with GE that I mentioned earlier is that it assumes a linear relationship between mutational load and fitness. This is not necessarily the case. If later mutations do affect fitness as you are claiming then they can be seen by selection. This is exactly what this paper concluded:
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Yes. But then we’d have to have an argument about what “functional information” means, how you would recognize it, and such. Let’s not. Shall we merely agree that you are not the pinnacle of creation, despite what the bible may have told you?
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