No, your illegitimate pseudoscientific idea called "genetic entropy" says it's not possible. However, you continually beat the point over our heads that genetic entropy "is observed," that H1N1 went "extinct" due to genetic entropy, that fitness is on a continual decline, and therefore
absolutely no populations can survive for millions of years.
It's time to walk through each and every one of these illegitimate claims you've made.
Regarding Dr. Kondrashov's question "Why have we not died 100 times over?", the simple response to your
deceitful citation is that Kondrashov, an evolutionary biologist, is referring to
modern times only, and he has never indicated that the build-up of deleterious mutations in humans is either
constant in all life, or indicative of how life behaved before the modern era.
Sanford and others like you have essentially repurposed his claim. I say this is illegitimate, and is similar to what Sanford did to Kimura's work (even going so far as to say that
if Kimura was still alive, he would agree with Sanford's conclusions. Posthumously besmirching the words and beliefs of an individual to suit your narrative is
morally repugnant, and is common in cult-like settings, where even Carl Sagan can be asserted to have "accepted that there is a God on his deathbed," by David C Pack). If a scientist
does not support your position, and his technical literature
does not support your position, you do not have the license to turn it around,
ad hoc, and say "Well, it supports our side anyway, and so you have to argue
against this credible scientist, even if he would publicly disavow my position." That is effectively what has incensed me against this forum for the last month. I firmly believe that such a tactic is
evil.
In the International Journal of Organic Evolution, I cite the introduction to the article
WHY WE ARE NOT DEAD ONE HUNDRED
TIMES OVER:
The genetic load of a population is the extent to which its mean
fitness, measured relative to the fitness of the genotype with the
highest possible fitness, is reduced below one (Crow 1958). The
load can be viewed as the lower bound to the proportion of the
population that fails to survive or reproduce as a result of selection.
Kondrashov (1995a) has drawn attention to the fact that weak
purifying selection acting on many nucleotide sites throughout
the genome can cause a very large genetic load compared with
the classical case of an infinite population at mutation–selection
balance (Haldane 1937; Crow 1958), because numerous slightly
deleterious mutations reach high frequencies or fixation as a result
of genetic drift (Kimura et al. 1963). He showed that the number
of sites under such selection cannot exceed 4Ne, where Ne is the
effective population size (Wright 1931), without causing so severe
a genetic load that the survival of the population is endangered,
unless truncation selection is acting.
Recent analyses of data on DNA sequence polymorphism and/or between-species divergence from both Drosophila
(Halligan and Keightley 2006; Zeng and Charlesworth 2010) and
human populations (Eory et al. 2010; Ward and Kellis 2012)
suggest that, in addition to purifying selection acting on nonsynonymous coding sites, there may be tens or even hundreds of
millions of silent sites subject to very weak purifying selection,
which is nevertheless strong enough to reduce the probabilities
of fixation of slightly deleterious mutations relative to neutral
expectation, and to affect their frequency distributions within
populations. These observations mean that the question of the
resulting genetic load needs to be revisited, as has recently been
done for the case of the less numerous, strongly selected nonsynonymous and noncoding sites in humans (Lesecque et al. 2012).
The purpose of this article is to reexamine the issue of the genetic
load for a finite diploid, randomly mating population in the light
of some new results on weak stabilizing and purifying selection presented by Charlesworth (2013), who argued that some important genomic traits such as genome size and codon usage may be
subject to stabilizing selection (where an intermediate trait value
is favored), rather than purifying selection (where an extreme trait
value is favored).
Do you understand yet
why Kondrashov does not support your position? Because
you do not properly account for selection.
In the words of another internet user:
The rest of the argument is even more nonsensical. Mutations can either be completely neutral and therefore "unselectable" or they can have an effect. By definition, if a mutation has an effect, it can be selected for or against. That's how selection works. So, stating that these tiny mutations (which do exist) cannot be selected for/against and yet are harmful is a direct contradiction. You can only have one or the other. If they are harmful, there will be a selective pressure to change/correct/lose these mutations.
Your side demands the following:
1. That there was a "perfect genome" such that it could reliably produce all the genetic diversity we see in nature from a monophyletic clade consisting of a single organism.
2. That
all mutations detract from this "perfect genome" and reduce the overall viability or fitness of the descendants.
3. That the biodiversity of all life had to spread out from this "perfect genome" at astronomical speeds in only 6,000 years, at which point it
effectively slows to a crawl the moment we start using measuring instruments.
Tell me the study that has been going on for millions of years that observed that has observed evolution.
Tell me where the body of the first organisms with the "perfect genomes" are that lets us measure "deterioration in the genome."
Fossils are nothing more than a snap shot of a specimen that lived in the past. How long ago it lived, its relation to other specimens is an inference of men.
It is based on consistently checked and verified methodologies that are supported by
all modern branches of physics. Radiometric dating has always been a creationist's nightmare, and to this day your side has to deflect by focusing on carbon dating. You can't address radiometric dating.
Take dinosaur bones, or as the Bible calls them behemoth's
False, you are injecting your own interpretation into the text. Talk with actual Hebrew scholars. You have
no evidence that dinosaurs roamed at the same time as man, and were alive and called "Behemoths." None at all, this is actually a straight up deception.
time says that dinosaur bones should not have any soft material in them after millions of years. But observational science has shown this to be true. So there is no way that these bones could be millions of years old.
Soft Tissue Found Inside a Dinosaur Bone!
Dr. Schweitzer did what actual scientists do, and investigated while coming to a tentative conclusion based on all available evidence. So, because it is indicated that there
are methods to preserve soft tissue beyond a million years, your claim that there is "no way" is
false.
What has been observed is genetic entropy. This has been shown to occur in viruses. In fact this is the reason why virus pandemics have not wiped man off the face of the Earth. As viruses mutate their genetic material breaks down with each passing mutation.
False, false, false, false, false, false, false.
Virus pandemics do not eliminate all of man because
we have immune systems and can develop immunity to specific strains. This is not due to mutation. I suggest you take
a course on virology. Your claim that viruses lose virulence because of mutations, and not because of host immunity/erasure is
laughable.
H1N1 is
not extinct, and in fact has come back to haunt humanity roughly every 20 years. In every case, the new strain that emerges is
not one that is "less accosted by mutations" as Sanford's cronies would have us believe, but because they circulate through a series of hosts, discretely. It is only when the virulence becomes especially hostile, and
the genes become more favorable to further infection that H1N1 arises and terrorizes the populace.
There is no evolutionary model that demands viruses kill every member of a population in some kind of arms race. At no point has the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory or viral biology ever been burdened by the question of why viruses don't wipe out populations all the time, because
we observe the subtle balance between virulence and host population stability. We also know about immune systems and the fact that strains of viruses are constantly undergoing mutation. If what you say is true, and all H1N1 populations are equally descendant from some "perfect viral strain," then why didn't
that strain wipe out all humans? Why are all the modern populations not equally as extinct as the strain that circulated in 2008?
Then we move onto mice. Your side
still needs to demonstrate that mice are somehow immune to genetic entropy, or are otherwise more "perfecter" than most other genomes, because we've been performing experiments on them for decades, and in the centuries we've studied them there have been no indications of impending mutational collapse.
What is not observed is the evolution, adaptation but not evolution.
Genetic Entropy: Applied Creationism Trips Over Its Own Feet
I recommend you reach out to James Downard and have a live discussion with him. He'd be
more than happy to use source methodology to demonstrate how little of the sources you use actually support your agenda.
What is observed is that you will repackage all scientific terms to support your agenda, but you can't actually argue against data. I will now spend an inordinate amount of time tearing apart every single false claim you make in this sub-forum over the next few days. Happy posting!
