No, it was just plain wrong, as are so many of your claims. You really should try harder to get the basics right before moving on to the more complex aspects of genetics and virology.
You should try to grapple with the main points rather than nitpicking minor details and pretending that by issuing these minor corrections you’ve won the argument or defeated the evidence. You haven’t. In poker that’s called overplaying your hand. But I do appreciate the minor correction there.
9 posts were split to a new topic: H1N1 and Genetic Entropy
Your original H1N1 did not remain unaltered even in 1918, let alone 90 years.
Obviously. It accrued a big mutational load. That’s the point of C&S’s paper.
After it went extinct, apparently.
I don’t really understand how that happened. Please explain.
I’m tired of explaining this repeatedly. Mercer is sowing confusion. Go learn about it if you want to.
“Sowing confusion?” How, exactly? I understand him perfectly, and his comments are clear and consistent. Yours are an incoherent mess.
We still have no idea regarding the “fundamentals” of GE?
SImple yes or no:
If GE leads inevitably to extinction, is constant increase in fitness of a lineage possible?
Follow up:
If no, then why do we see that?
If yes, how do reconcile the contradiction between the fitness of a lineage steadily increasing, and also heading inevitably to extinction? That is like saying someone grows shorter as his height increases.
And totally wrong.
Yours are an incoherent mess.
You’re hopelessly biased then, because that’s just false.
The only guy who seems to agree here is the guy who also thinks we are weeks away from finding the remnants of Noah’s Ark.
The dissenters include people with extensive training and experience in the field. Which you admittedly lack.
I suggest you take a big dose of that humility that is supposedly a Christian virtue.
You go where the authorities lead, and I’ll go where the evidence leads. But as it happens both Dr. Sanford and Dr. Carter have extensive training and are PhD scientists themselves, so we can play that game if you like.
Bumped for PDPrice.
Why do you ignore the equine genetic data and run from all questions about how GE fits with your Noah’s Ark claims?
Is that an intellectually honest way to deal with the topic of GE?
Like you’re going where that huge equine genetic history I posted above leads? ![]()
Uh huh. You mean like how when a virus kills 75,000 people, you consider it to be extinct?
In what universe is that considered going where the evidence leads?
As the Genetic Entropy discussion has been the topic of several threads and also spilled over to unrelated threads, it may be useful to pull together some of the failings of GE.
GE misrepresentation: Creation began with a state of perfect fitness.
Fact: The very word, fitness, is about the relationship between an organism and its local habitat. It is about being comparatively favored under environmental stressors. It is NOT about being closer to created perfection or about approximating some platonic ideal.
GE misrepresentation: Fitness should be defined in terms of real traits and abilities like intelligence or strength or longevity. Price and Carter - Fitness and ‘Reductive Evolution’
Fact: Fitness cannot be an inherent trait because environments are dynamic. This is important, so I will restate it. Fitness cannot be an inherent trait because environments are almost never ever ever static. The very characteristic which is an advantage in one setting is often a disadvantage at another time or place. An example is that animals on islands tend to be smaller than continental relatives. Another would be those spotted moths.
GE misrepresentation: Mutation accumulation results in extinction.
Fact: Genome stability results in extinction. When an environment changes faster than the population can adapt, the species goes extinct. There is no evidence of accumulated mutation collapsing a species, including H1N1.
GE misrepresentation: The purpose of the paper was to see if we could find genetic entropy in action, and we did. Attempts to obscure genetic entropy in the H1N1 Virus
Fact: This should be headlined as “attempt to obscure our real agenda”. If that was the purpose of the paper, it is interesting that the phrase “genetic entropy” is not even found in the paper!
GE misrepresentation: There is a correlation between disease attenuation and accumulated mutations in H1N1
…there is obviously also a correlation between mutation count and reduced death rates. A New Look at an Old Virus
Fact: Even in 1918, the H1N1 grew more virulent. Not only is Sanford proposing a correlation absent causation or physiological mechanism, but the correlation itself is a non-starter.
GE misrepresentation: Genetic entropy is not really directly about reproduction—it is about the decline of information in the genome.
Fact: It is about the decline of information in the minds of young earth creationists. GE does not allow for a world where one population lived with the exact same smallpox pathogen while another was decimated. GE cannot account for a virus crossing over species barriers to begin with. Measles does not line up with the GE narrative. There is no evidence of any decline in human or animal genetics over the past thousands of years.
GE practical application: From Sanford Carter Thus, the possibility of an artificial acceleration of mutation rate deserves further investigation, and may suggest new avenues of research in terms of pandemic management
Question: What could possibly go wrong???
Good summary post Ron. Myself and others have been making these same points to PDPrice for a solid week now. Do you think he payed attention to a single comment? He won’t even acknowledge the scientific evidence posted or what’s been explained to him ad nauseum.
Yet the data points emphasized with a red circle in the graph in all three (paper and two web articles) include–even emphasize–the 2009-2010 swine flu, not Spanish flu:

So how could that possibly be the point of the paper?
C&S claimed in 2012 that H1N1 had become “apparently extinct” since 2009-10. That claim was sketchy, even in 2012, and I suspect that a reviewer demanded the insertion of “apparently,” but it does not rise to a deliberate attempt to deceive.
Maybe they really believed it in 2012. It’s just flat-out false now. Therefore, any claim in 2014, 2018, or 2019 that H1N1 is extinct, or even apparently extinct, is objectively false.
What P,C,&S are doing on their web site (and P here) is pretending that the 2012 “apparently extinct” claim has not been shown to be false.
Paul is desperately left to pretend that “H1N1” only refers to the Spanish flu, but the figure legends in the published paper and Carter’s 2014 solo article on the web site completely contradict his claim, as does the 2018 article coauthored by Carter and @PDPrice.
GE can have positive effect on fitness in a particular environment for some time.
To see this, imagine the scene; thieves have just robbed a bank and fled behind the wheel of a car. A few moments later, they see in the mirror that they are being chased by a police car. A pursuit race begins. But inexorably, the police car is gaining ground and threatening to catch up with the crooks. In this situation, burglars decide to throw out the window everything they can, seats, doors, etc… to lighten the vehicle. In doing so, they regain speed and manage to lose their pursuers.
Wow. And I thought the rusting car analogy was lame.
tI could be they were fleeing in a rusty car. That is why the police car was catching up.