Creating this thread as a place to move distracting comments (if necessary) and to hold discussion what really should be added to the main topic.
I would like to avoid multiple people piling on to make the same comments. If someone else has touched on a subject already, try to leave that subject to them. If the subject can be added to or improved upon, hash out those details here before taking it back to the main thread.
Don’t know if the video deals with this at all, and I have little interest in watching it, but the greatest flaw in GE is not its approach to population genetics but its required assumption that earth and life are only a few thousand years old, with each species separately created. You can’t resolve an unsolved problem with a counterfactual assumption.
For anybody who is interested enough to take a look at it, but not interested enough to sit through all 138 minutes of the debate itself, here’s an AI-generated transcript of the debate (I had to use a text-to-pdf converter to get the forum to let me upload it).
transcript.pdf (153.3 KB)
Thanks much. I find this bit in response to a question about how long it would take the human species to go extinct (from some optimal starting point):
So if your simulation shows you that the human lineage* can’t be as old as 40,000 years, you naturally reject deep time instead of rejecting your simulation. I guess you would, I dunno.
*which stretches back 4 billion years or so
Yes, every since Paul’s SLiM simulations came up in conversation, I’ve been thinking of the George Box quote:
All models are wrong, but some are useful
I suppose it depends on how you define “useful” – useful for understanding reality – or useful for furthering your own arguments.
I’d been thinking about pulling out a transcript ever since the subject of Kondrashov’s Paradox came up on the last thread. Thanks for reminding me to do so.
I found the discussion on that topic not particularly surprising, considering the personalities involved.
He seems to assume that everyone knows that God intended the Genesis Creation stories to be a reliable historical account - or at least that there is no excuse for believing otherwise . Even OECs are “blinded by hubris” as he puts it.
Of course if it could be so easily demonstrated it’s surprising that YECs don’t do it.
If GE means the Earth must be young, then the Earth being old means GE must be wrong.
The End.
@Paul_King I think Zach’s use of “mutation-free” is ambiguous, which isn’t helping anything. Is a normal population with normal variability in fitness “mutation free” or not?
Variability in fitness is key here, because it is the variability in fitness within a population that allowed Selection towards greater fitness to occur.
In the other thread I was considering making that point, too, specifically when Paul suggested that one needed to find all the numbers and run the simulation like he did. I found it amusing that he would put so much stock in an effort that yielded a result so obviously completely incorrect.
A possible response might have been that the assumptions fed into the simulation yield results that are hard to square with deep time. So assuming the simulation accounts for all the dominant factors and does not commit any very embarassing mathematical blunders, the “evolutionist” is being inconsistent by believing all the rate estimations of vafious processes factoring into evolution (and hence the simulation) and also in the longevity of species or life on earth as a whole. I could insist, of course, that we can measure with consistency and reliability the ages of a multitude of things, including human and proto-human remains older than some 40k years, and that something must therefore be wrong with the simulation or the data it was fed. Ignorant of the subject, I would, however, struggle to form a hypothesis as to what specifically may be a cause of the error. So I decided to abstain from making that point there.
So far as I can see the objection is only to denying the existence of an originally created population. I don’t think that is important to the debate or even unreasonable in the context. It might have been better to exclude it and only talk about current populations to avoid wasting time on trivial details, but even there I think that the objection is a bigger problem than the original statement, Even before we consider how very unclear the objection was,
And not just to Paul King, but
I think it is crucial. First, we really should define the starting population in both settings (Evo and GE) before arguing about it. If there is no difference that is OK, but it defines what is meant by “mutation-free”. What matters is the variability in fitness in the initial population and afterwards. Under evolution a population should have enough variability in fitness that selection can occur.
Under Creation, it may or may not have that variability. Did the population ever have sufficient variability in fitness for selection to occur? If yes, what cause it to lose that variability? If no, then why don’t new mutations add new variability? (They should)
Newly added variability should increase the range of fitness until selection is possible. Why doesn’t that happen?
GE depends on a population having very limited variability in fitness, and only considering the average fitness, with no new variability being added. All mutations, especially deleterious ones, should add to the variability in fitness. Once the variability becomes “big enough for Selection to see”, selection will occur.
I am intentionally trying to stay out of the main discussion so I can moderate, but maybe someone can make this point in their own words?
In his latest post, Zach has said a couple of things that gelled with things that I’ve said/thought previously:
This lack of precision is what I was alluding to when I said:
I cannot help but suspect that GE, at least as Sanford describes it in his book, contains enough contradiction, equivocation and/or ambiguity such that any counterexample against it can be dismissed as being excluded by some version or interpretation of it.
This highlights a problem I have had with GE since I first encountered Sanford’s “No Selection Zone” chart. This is not a region where selection disappears completely (but rather where drift dominates over selection), a non-discontinuous effect (there will only be slight differences slightly inside versus slightly outside this zone), and you will have opposite interaction on either side of the y-axis – with drift diminishing selection on one side, but reinforcing it on the other. These concerns seemed intuitively logical to me, but it is good to see numbers confirming that intuition.
This in turn highlights something I have noticed repeatedly over my interaction with PS. Whilst there are many issues with creationist claims that need a deep knowledge of the relevant science to adjudicate, there is with, considerable regularity, issues that are obvious even to a reasonably well-read layman such as myself.
This means that, although I cannot enumerate all the flaws with creationism, I can see for myself, and without ‘taking the word’ of others, enough flaws that creationism does not hold together.
I’ve been trying to refine my (layman’s) thinking on Kondrashov’s Paradox.
The ‘paradox’ in question seems to be between (a certain interpretation) of population genetics theory suggesting that we should have gone extinct (“died” as a species) “100 times over”, and the empirical observation that we are still here.
The scientific resolution to this paradox, that Kondrashov proposed in his original paper, is to extend the theory to include a wider range of factors, that can explain this survival.
The YEC resolution would appear to be that yes we are going extinct, but that we have been around for a sufficiently short time that we haven’t gone extinct yet. If it takes us 20,000 years to go extinct (as I’ve seen suggested) and we’ve only been around for around 6,000 (as YEC suggests), then we have 14,000 years left on our use-by date.
The question then becomes one of which resolution is more consistent with the empirical evidence?
The YEC resolution would appear to indicate that we have used up 30% of out genetic lifespan. Is there any empirical evidence to support this?
Is there any evidence that modern human DNA contains significantly more deleterious mutations than from specimens from one, two or three millenia ago?
Is there a “properly filled out [and] developed” (i.e. non-vacuous) explanation why mammals with shorter generations (e.g. mice) have not gone extinct already? Ideally, this would involve rerunning the calculation, model or simulation that produced the 20,000 years figure for humans, with consistent parameters for mice, and demonstrating that the answer is greater than 6,000 years.
Am I misinterpreting either the paradox, or either of the resolutions?
What does the empirical evidence (and/or any modeling casting light on the empirical fact of mice survival) have to say?
Addendum:
How would the ‘YEC resolution’ account for the entailed Noahic Flood bottleneck (Paul’s model appears to start with a population of two, at Adam and Eve, without a population reset for a bottleneck in the 10th and 11th generations – those of Noah and his sons)?
This bottleneck would seem to yield a period of reduced population, and thus increased drift, and reduced elimination of deleterious mutations.
The idea that evolution must be a religion is one of the silliest falsehoods preached by Creationists.
The fact that its adherents cling to it with religous ferver even after it is shown in minute detail to be unworkable and illogical shows quite definitively that it is indeed a religion. A state-funded religion at that.
I am struck by the irony that you are basically conceding that people defend their religion against evidence and reason. You’ve internalized the central criticism of religiosity as causing people to become unreasonable and irrational in response to disconfirmatory arguments and evidence. Does that apply to those following your religious views too, or is it just everyone else?
Even better is the subtext that religion is a bad thing.
Life is exactly as common descent would expect and the laws of nature demand. You can see the outcome of deep time by viewing the debris fields from galactic collisions which had to happen over millions of years, which is in addition to the distant starlight problem and has nothing to do with maturity. What can be more unworkable and illogical than denying your own eyes?
Just because you are in thrall of your dogmas does not mean others are not thinking clearly.
Which you would love if it was yours. Get prayer back in schools. The ten commandments on the lawn, teach creation science in class rather than evolution, etc. If the public school system taught all the things you like instead of things you don’t like, creationists would be thrilled with public schooling rather than electing to homeschool their children.
Paul, the fact that a small minority of ill-informed Christians believe “with religous ferver[sic]” that they have “shown in minute detail” that evolution is “unworkable and illogical”, doesn’t make it so, nor does it make evolution a religion.
The fact that (i) evolution requires no more supernatural presuppositions than gravity (is gravity now a religion?), and (ii) that many people of a wide range of religions accept it, and even make careers out of studying it, makes it blatantly obvious to anybody that doesn’t have a vested interest in denying this obvious fact (e.g. a creationist apologist) that evolution is not a religion.
That you would make such a monumentally silly claim simply serves to further demonstrate your complete lack of credibility.
