All of these claims you’re making are from astronomy and are irrelevant to the topic under discussion. It’s an entirely different debate. But what you are basically admitting is that your mind was never open on the topic and regardless of the outcome of the debate you were never open to reconsidering the plausibility of evolution.
Certainly, people do that. I am not saying that I am guilty of that. I don’t need to resort to defending my religion against evidence and reason, because I’m too busy defending it with evidence and reason.
Scientific consilience is not “irrelevant to the topic under discussion” Paul. Scientific theories are meant to be compatible with each other (and with the empirical evidence supporting each other).
If GE is contradicted by astronomical deep time, and the evidence underlying it, then it will be rejected by science.
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Yes, I understand that, but when you make the claim of consilience you are claiming that all the evidence fits together and agrees. And I am showing that is far from the case. You don’t have the consilience you seem to think you have. Debates about other realms of evidence are different debates. This concept isn’t hard to grasp. If I had come to my debate with Dr. Hancock with a bunch of slides talking about soft tissue in dinosaur bones, I don’t think that would have been an appropriate thing to do in a debate about genetics.
You have shown no such thing.
Yes, and that debate was with somebody other than Ron and myself, and finished several days ago. Therefore neither Ron nor myself are under any obligation to restrict ourselves to the topic of that debate, nor evidence directly relevant to it.
I would point out that your own evolution-as-religion cracks were likewise irrelevant to that debate. Yet you seem to have no inhibition about making them.
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Not true. I was raised on Acts & Facts and eagerly proselytized creationism at school, and only saw through the misrepresentations and inconsistencies as an adult. Deep time is relevant to the conversation and astronomy is definitive. Evolution is supported by evidence broad and deep and it is a fool’s errand to seize on some rhetorical pinprick in the hope of popping a balloon. I’m under no obligation to accord nonsense any consideration.
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Throwing false accusations against people simply for disagreeing with you is using neither evidence nor reason.
It’s the science that gets state funding.
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You overstate the results of your simulations. What you have is similar to the well-known but possibly fictional demonstration that bumblebees can’t fly. Facts on the ground trump simulations, and what you have instead shown is that some parameters or perhaps basic modeling in the simulation do not match reality. The reality is that Homo sapiens is not extinct even though it’s ten times as old as your extinction limit. And of course it’s worse than that, since the lineage is much, much older than the species, extending back 4 billion years, a million times more than your extinction limit. Bumblebees can fly, too.
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It bears pointing out that the simulator itself is the same one that Dr. Hancock himself used, and it was developed by secular, non-creationist population geneticists. Dr. Hancock attested previously in one of his videos that it is the most accurate and realistic forward-time simulator available, and it is in wide use in the field.
Regarding the parameters, I drew all of them from cited peer-reviewed sources. I made up none of them myself.
Evolution is not a “fact on the ground”, it is the very thing under debate. When you assume the thing under debate is true from the start, that is called circular reasoning.
You misunderstand. The “fact on the ground” is the antiquity of our species and of life. You are forced to the contrary-to-fact assumption that the world is only a few thousand years old. Whether current population genetics theories are correct is not relevant to that central issue.
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That’s not a fact on the ground either, it’s an interpretation based upon extrapolation (very, very far outside the bounds of our actual data collection), and one which depends on the cherry-picking of which pieces of evidence to consider.
I would just like to say that University of Chicago rules!
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I would respectfully disagree. It might be the strongest population genetic argument, but the strongest argument is that deep time exists and we’re still here, as are millions of other species, all of them from equally old lineages.
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Speaking of things under debate (something not being a fact but being disputed), can you show that the DFE for LME is fixed?
Note that I am not asking merely for an estimation of the current human DFE, say. I am asking for evidence that it remains fixed, or at least so unchanging as to render GE inevitable for LMEs.
When you’ve taken the DFE you found to the SLiM simulation you did and run it all the way to human extinction, you’ve also assumed something to be a fact which is in dispute. Which is that DFE you used would stay constant all the way.
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I’m sure it seems that way to someone fanatically devoted to YEC. But it isn’t.
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This is an inappropriate attempt to shift the burden of proof away from the one making a claim. Your claim is that the published DFEs would not be representative (not even over a measly 2000 generations). So you would need to give some kind of evidence for your claim, not demand that I refute the claim that you’ve made without evidence.
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The entire point and purpose of the “genetic entropy” gibberish is to dispute the idea that life as we know it – and therefore the universe that hosts it – is ancient. That mutations happen and are passed on is not in dispute, but assumed (if only for the sake of argument), and the conclusion is that therefore life can only be a few thousand years old at most. The fact that the universe is, in actuality, billions of years old is not irrelevant here.
Sure, earth could have been barren for all of it but the last few thousand years, or perhaps other trees of life evolved before ours did. But let’s not pretend that these possibilities are actually on the table for young-earth creationists like yourself. You are arguing for a young earth and universe, and you are grasping at an admittedly complicated system – ecology and how it interacts with genetics – because, frankly, that’s the only place where you can even begin to make a case for your position.
If all of your GE argument was granted, it would do bugger-all to nullify everything we know about radioactive decay, for instance. So, ultimately, the conclusion you want to get to (setting aside that the argument wouldn’t strictly lead there anyway) would remain entirely unworkable in light of scientific fields that are much simpler and vastly more robustly understood than population genetics.
No, that’s actually called begging the question. However, evolution is not actually in dispute. You are granting that the gene pool of populations does, in fact, change over time, and that selection biases what ultimately survives at what rate. What you are arguing against – or trying to – is the ancient age of the earth, not the evolution of life on it.
There exist human and proto-human remains an order of magnitude older than what your simulation suggests is the upper limit for how long our lineage could have existed for. The remains are not extrapolations, they are actual physical objects. Their ages are not interpretations, they are actually measured by demonstrably and consistently reliable techniques, the dismissal of which would entail a dismissal of all of our understanding of physics, including everything underlying modern electronics. The existence of those remains, and their ages, therefore, are indeed facts on the ground. And no amount of simulating will suffice to eliminate these facts. It is not the mark of a closed mind to dismiss what is physically impossible, and neither is an admission that one would do so well ahead of settling the merits of an argument whose conclusion does not even touch upon the matter at hand to begin with.
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Wrong. When you simulate GE with a fixed DFE and argue this means humanity and LME are destined to go extinct, that constitutes a claim, and part of that claim is a constant DFE.
I don’t know where you get these generation numbers from as I have made no claims about what number of generations DFEs are “representative”, whatever that is supposed to mean.
But I have given good evidence that the sorts of DFEs we have in fact tested over many generations, show strong evidence of changing significantly with fitness. In addition to perfectly reasonable arguments from physics and biochemistry why it must be so for large multicellular eukaryotes too.
In response you have erected ad-hoc demands that we must prove the DFE you used wouldn’t remain fixed, contrary to what happens to others that were in fact tested.
So between the two of us, I am the one with more empirical support. So please justify your assumption.
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No, you definitely aren’t. I am the one using an empirical DFE which is published, specifically for the creature I was modelling in my simulation.
You are the one making an unsupported claim that some other DFE would allegedly come into play and rescue the situation, yet without any relevant evidence to support your claim. I have challenged you to cite any DFE for any LME that shows anything other than the implication of fitness decline.
Your failure to provide this is strong evidence that you aren’t aware of any such data.
Minute detail? You think what you and your ilk produce is minute detail???
:
You haven’t got a [redacted] clue.
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