Which fallacy is it?

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@misterme987

Otangelo’s argument might be about a mechanism. But all I’m saying is that the type of reasoning he presents is fallacious, no matter what the mechanism is.

Hi Andrew
The reasoning behind your assertion remains unclear. He is simply making an argument given genetic entropy as a working hypothesis that survival of an ancient living organism with small populations is unlikely. LUCA is a hypothetical construct so there is no basis to claim he is committing the TSS.

[Dan_Eastwood]

The sub-argument about who committed which fallacy can have a home here.

[nwrickert (Neil Rickert)]

If we are going to talk about fallacies, I’ll just point out that LUCA is a hypothetical individual. And individuals don’t go extinct.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

AFAICT including contradictory attributes in your terms (“first last universal common ancestor”) is too ridiculous to qualify as a fallacy.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

The reasoning behind your assertion remains unclear. He is simply making an argument given genetic entropy as a working hypothesis that survival of an ancient living organism with small populations is unlikely.

1. That’s a “those can’t be craters on the moon if there’s an invisible field preventing meteorite impacts” argument. There isn’t such a field, and we know that because we can see craters.

2. Genetic Entropy isn’t real. Literally zero evidence for it.

3. And there’s no reason to think the population of LUCA was ever small enough for something like error catastrophe to be a problem. Of course since we all now exist and descent from LUCA, it clearly wasn’t (see the craters analogy).

[John_Harshman]

@nwrickert

If we are going to talk about fallacies, I’ll just point out that LUCA is a hypothetical individual. And individuals don’t go extinct.

No, LUCA is a hypothetical population.