The Fall of Historical Adam, (Federal Head of man), impacts all of humanity to need Christ's Salvation

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@Burrawang

But doesn’t evolution posit that humans are the end result of an ever increasing complexity of life that started with the first single cell billions of years ago?

Somewhat… what difference does that make to the assertion that if genetic entropy were real, then it would drive bacteria extinct long, long, before it would be detectable in humans?

@Burrawang

why proper procedures were not rigorously adhered to in the professional labs that have found C14 inside diamonds that by their very crystal lattice structure are virtually impossible to contaminate with atmospheric or soluble C14. The cry of contamination is really just clutching at straws simply because the alternative does not align with your worldview of ‘deep time’.

The detection instruments contain tiny amounts of previous samples, people collecting the samples contain carbon, the air contains carbon, basically anything near the samples contains carbon, etc., etc. 90,000 years is about 54000 times less C14 than modern (ignoring nuclear tests, which increase that factor a bit)–so, if the sample being tested is 0.1 grams, that is the equivalent of 2 micrograms of “something modern” in the sample. And that sample size is probably unrealistically high. Also, given that ~50,000 years is generally acknowledged to be the limit of useful data (as opposed to just noise) for C-14 under good conditions (closer to 20,000 under more easily-contaminated conditions), 90,000 years is meaningless beyond “at least 50,000-60,000 years”, which, incidentally, is good evidence against a young earth, as >50,000 is compatible with a million or a billion, but not with 6,000.

@Burrawang

don’t you understand that the basic laws of chemistry and physics preclude any possibility of preservation for such an enormous period of time?

They don’t, unless some spectacular new discovery has found that tough “soft” tissues degrade much faster than they are thought to.

@Burrawang

Why not just take our Lord and Saviour’s word for it?

That the world had a beginning and that God was the one who caused that beginning and has continued upholding creation since? Yes, I do take his word for that, but the Bible says nothing about the existence or properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, geology, cars, the internet, or anything else that no one had ever heard of before 1800. What is does speak to are ethics, theology, and, to a much lesser extent, history, mostly as it directly relates to theology.

@Burrawang

Hoyle readily saw through the fallacious assumptions behind the ‘big bang’ theory. In 1994 he wrote, ‘Big-Bang cosmology refers to an epoch that cannot be reached by any form of astronomy, and, in more than two decades, it has not produced a single successful prediction.

Hoyle was stubbornly wrong. And is a 30 year-old claim really that relevant to the current state of cosmology?

@Burrawang

Even though many people currently consider cosmic microwave background radiation a successful prediction of the ‘big bang,’ this is very shaky, and would fit better with Dr Russ Humphreys’ cosmological model that involves God having stretched out the cosmos

How is it not good evidence for the Big Bang; also, why are observed isotope ratios so close to what is predicted by the Big Bang?

@Burrawang

who are seduced by its apparent teaching of a beginning of the universe

How is this a problem? The Big Bang is in far, far, far, better agreement with Genesis than Hoyle was.

@Burrawang

saw through the fallacious assumptions behind the ‘big bang’ theory

What fallacious assumptions?

I have yet to see any plausible reasons for YEC organizations claiming that the Big Bang is all wrong, given that both postulate the universe to have a beginning, unlike Hoyle and others who endorsed the Steady-State Theory, or “enlightenment” deism with its cyclic history-worldview.

[St.Roymond]

@Jay313

Sin isn’t connected to physical death.

It is and it isn’t. Even assuming Adam and Eve were real, that Adam was made from dust means that he was mortal, though with what has been called “provisional immortality”, a term indicating that if things had gone right they would have attained immortality. The flip side of that could be called “probationary mortality”, and when things didn’t go right the probation was over and they were confirmed as mortal.

@Jay313

That’s a fantasy dreamt up by fevered minds.

If you somehow want to maintain that they were immortal and lost it, then yes, that’s a fantasy, though I wouldn’t say it had anything to do with “fevered minds”. It’s an easy step from seeing that God pronounced everything “very good” to deciding that meant “perfect”, and in Western minds at least perfect implies no disease or anything else that might result in death, and from there it’s easy to conclude they must have been immortal. But that’s not in the text regardless of how many centuries it’s been taught – it falls into the category of “traditions of men”, and those are difficult to detect when you’ve been raised with them!

@Burrawang

It is not I that connects sin with death, doesn’t the scripture state “The wages of sin is death”.

That’s an “if p, then q” statement, which does not mean “only if p, then q”. Describing a creature as being made from dust was an ancient near eastern way of saying that creature was mortal, so we have “if p, then q” but also “if b, then q”.

[St.Roymond]

@Burrawang

Natural Selection is real but it ALWAYS only selects from what already exists.

Nope. This was demonstrated by a ranger in the U.S. west in whose range was an old gold mine where arsenic abounded. That arsenic leached into a stream, where it got more and more dilute as it flowed downstream. One of the ranger’s tasks was to collect samples of the water where that stream flowed into another; one day he decided to try an experiment: he took a population of microorganisms from the most recent sample and put them into water with a higher arsenic concentration. Many died, but the survivors and their descendants did fine, so he repeated the procedure, transferring some of the survivors’ descendants into water with a slightly higher arsenic concentration.
After many iterations of this, he found that the concentration of arsenic in the latest sample was not what he’d started with, so he examined the surviving microorganisms and discovered that they weren’t just surviving the arsenic, they were sequestering it in their bodies. So he transferred a batch of them into water with even more arsenic. Skipping a bunch of iterations, he eventually found that some of the microorganisms weren’t just surviving by sequestering arsenic, they were thriving – and examination of the new population showed that they had acquired the ability to metabolize arsenic.

So at two different points in his series of iterations new information had shown up in the microrganisms’ genomes, once giving the ability to sequester arsenic in their bodies and one giving the ability to metabolize arsenic. That this was new information was established when he went back to samples from before the second ability had been acquired and repeated the procedures, and the second ability didn’t show up even with many, many more iterations.

Natural selection preserved those organisms better able to survive with arsenic in their environment; that may have been just sorting information already present. But when the new abilities showed up it couldn’t have been due to existing information because it had never happened before, thus demonstrating that the ranger’s populations of microorganisms had acquired new genetic information.

Of course we also know that new information occurs because it’s been observed happening in numerous other instances including among humans.

@Burrawang

Thus to validate belief in evolution you need to demonstrate how simple organisms have written the encyclopaedic volumes of NEW information required in their DNA that codes for novel structures, processes and designs that didn’t exist prior in the gene pool.

No, you only have to show that new information has occurred – how is another question.

@Burrawang

The millions of years is a uniformitarian belief construct that has no basis in empirical reality.

Okay, at this point in the thread making that statement demonstrates dishonesty since it has been explained to you that and how ages of rocks have been measured. I contributed one, namely the establishment of minimum ages by examination of the bending of rock layers.

@Burrawang

The millions of years of Earth history is a myth.

Tell that to the Hebrew scholars who well before there were even telescopes concluded from the text of Genesis that the universe was unimaginably ancient and that the Earth was also uncountably ancient. At least one concluded from examination of all the texts about Creation that the Earth must be millions of years old.

@Burrawang

individual specimens of many dozens of organisms that are unquestionably living today are also found in sedimentary strata that is alleged to be hundreds of millions of years old with virtually NO CHANGE IN ALL THAT TIME???

I’m no biologist, but even I know enough to understand that what you put in bold is exactly what the theory of evolution predicts. That you think it contradicts that theory indicates that you have not, actually, researched the matter, especially since it’s not even advanced biology; a high school understanding is sufficient to know better.

People ask why YECists get pounced on so hard. You just demonstrated one reason: YECists regularly claim to have done research but their statements demonstrate a failure to achieve even a high school level of understanding of the science.

And that in turn is why young Christians abandon the faith in droves: they recognize arguments from ignorance and given how loud YECists are about those they presume that those arguments are Christian beliefs, so they quite logically abandon the faith.

@JoelHinrichs

reconcile our flawed understanding of simple texts

The flawed understanding begins with treating the Creation accounts as “simple texts” – they were simple to the original audience(s) because those audiences recognized the literary genres being employed, but both those genres and the worldview(s) they came from are alien to us, making it that for us the texts are not simple.

[St.Roymond]

@SkovandOfMitaze

we see tree ferns that are huge.

I love the ones that can only be recognized as not being ground ferns by seeing the trunks. I’m fascinated by pictures from directly above where the ferns look exactly like a ground species, but then when the same ones are shown from an angle the trunks become visible.

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

@Paraleptopecten

@Burrawang

pose a problem evolution, which is about fantastic changes.

No they do not, and evolution is not about “fantastic” changes.

Indeed. With only very rare exceptions, evolution is about creatures reproducing according to their kind – i.e., offspring are much like parents.

@Paraleptopecten

@Burrawang

Are scientists guilty of using language that serves to distort or disguise the facts?

At times, probably. Are these article titles? Definitely.

Science journalists are worse; they deliberately word things to make new discoveries sound earth-shattering.

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

@adamjedgar

If ithe wages of sin is death is an allegory

Said no one here ever except you.

@adamjedgar

And as i said, you were the one who put yourself in this spot…it was you who wrote on the forums that a living soul is both physical and spiritual. So you opened the floodgates to your own demise on this one

Only in your imagination.

You keep repeating the same material that has been shown to be pointless or false, over and over.

@Burrawang

I absolutely disagree. The text absolutely DOES SAY that in the original.

It doesn’t even say that in the translations you listed. Out of forty-plus translations available online, not a single one of them specifies “ordinary day”. In fact until day four they can’t be ordinary days because there’s no sun to mark them, and ancient scholars recognized that until day six they couldn’t be called ordinary days because there were no humans around to mark time – so they called them “divine days”.

I’ve listed a bunch of views by scholars showing that reading these as ordinary days is adding to the text. Since you’ve paid no attention whatsoever to those I don’t see any reason to provide what you must be aware of already, that the Hebrew י֔וֹם can mean several things besides an ordinary day.

@Paraleptopecten

@Burrawang

The Big Bang is a myth that simply doesn’t stack up against the Biblical history

It says “the universe appeared, and here is our best educated guess about how” How is that counter to the Bible?

Given that the Big Bang idea was put forth by Hebrew scholars back before we even had telescopes pretty much makes the idea that it is a “myth” a joke. Sure, they didn’t call it a “bang” of any kind, they just said that Genesis tells us that the universe started off smaller than a grain of mustard and expanded inconceivably rapidly to an immense size until the fluid that filled the universe got thin enough for light to flow, but that pretty much summarizes the Big Bang concept.

@Burrawang

The heavens were rolled out by Him as if they were a scroll.

That you think that should be taken literally shows that you aren’t interested in actually studying the scriptures, only in forcing them to fit your preconceived notions.

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@St.Roymond

Tell that to the Hebrew scholars who well before there were even telescopes concluded from the text of Genesis that the universe was unimaginably ancient and that the Earth was also uncountably ancient. At least one concluded from examination of all the texts about Creation that the Earth must be millions of years old.

@St.Roymond

Given that the Big Bang idea was put forth by Hebrew scholars back before we even had telescopes

I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a while—who are the Hebrew scholars to whom you are referring here? I’d be interested to know what they said.

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@jammycakes

The problem that I have with young earthists with science degrees is that they should reasonably be expected to know these things. They should be expected to know what differentiates good arguments from bad arguments. They should be expected to know how science works in reality, how measurement works, and the mathematical basis behind it all. They should be expected to know that soft tissue is not the same as soft tissue remnants, that DNA breakdown products are not the same as sequenceable DNA, and that contamination is an unavoidable factor in any form of measurement, radiocarbon studies included, that must be correctly taken into account and correctly quantified without either exaggerating or downplaying its extent or significance before claiming that anything out of the ordinary is going on. They should be expected to know that science has rules—rules that do not depend on anyone’s worldviews but that are the same for Christians and atheists alike.

that is simply not the case. Whether or not you are willing to accept it, scientists all have presuppositions that they go looking to further.

In terms of your claim that true scientists dont exagerate…please explain how it is that the following happened:

1. The Piltown man - a complete hoax combination of head of human and jawbone of an orangutan with filed down teeth where the file marks were not visible in the cast copy of the fossil but when the real one was finally viewed, they were plainly visible…45 years this hoax went on for!

2. KNM ER373

3. Zing - a total fabrication with outrageous artistic license

4. Boules written reportn in 1911 “Annals de Paleontologie” of the La-Chapelle-au-saints-skull where despite the cranial volum being far greater than that of an ape (it was 200cm3 larger than the average human), Boule decided to make it look like an ape modifying stance, big toes,…he had its stance so out of balance the creature could not possibly have walked upright without falling flat on its face. Turns out it was a normal Neandertal he had grossley misrepresented…this error was not corrected until 1957

Thanks to Boule, the Neandertalers have had a bad reputation from the start, one they did not deserve. It is now admitted that their differences from modern humans are rather superficial. Their low, wide cranium and heavy browridges caused people to think of them as “savage,” even though there is nothing in the anatomy of a person to indicate his morality, behavior, or degree of culture

5. Even Lucy is hotly debated…a far fetched claim of ancestry. Its basically claiming a reptile laid an egg and a bird hatched out of it!

In the gradual model, the entire Lucy population would change into some form of Homo habilis, and that population would change gradually into Homo erectus. The Homo erectus population would change gradually into early Homo sapiens (or into Neandertals), and they would change eventually into us…
we have a right to expect that very modern-looking fossils would not show up in Lucy times and that primitive or archaic fossils would not embarrass the evolutionist by showing up in modern times.

6. The Tuang fiasco…

In 1973, South African geologist T. C. Partridge dropped a bomb. His investigations revealed that the cave from which the Taung skull had come could not have formed prior to 0.87 Mya[4] (“Mya” means “million years ago”; “ya” means “years ago”). That meant that the Taung skull could be at most only three-quarters of a million years old. Since it could take up to a million years for the hominids to evolve from one species to another, to go all the way from australopithecines to modern humans in only three-quarters of a million years was out of the question

7. Black SKull KNM-WT 17000

The A. africanus forms were moved to the australopithecine branch of the family tree, becoming the link between Lucy and the robust australopithecines. This comfortable arrangement was severely jolted by the discovery in 1985 of the famous “black skull,” KNM-WT 17000.[10] Australopithecine phylogeny is now in disarray

8. KNM-KP 271

Their reasoning was that the upper end of the humerus of A. africanus is quite similar, based on visual assessment, to that of modern humans. Hence, they assumed that the lower end was similar also, even though they did not have the lower humerus portion of A. africanus for comparison with KNM-KP 271. The real reason for this strange departure from their data comes out later. Further computer analysis of many more measurements revealed even more dramatically the similarity of KNM-KP 271 to modern humans.

I could go on, however, i think my point is made. What Jammycakes has claimed regarding scientists outside of YEC and their supposed lack of bias is simply not correct. We all have our biases according to our predispositioned world view. We seek to interprete evidence accordingly. The difference here is that the bible is a very different world view than secularism…eternal life is at stake!

[Burrawang]

@glipsnort

No, it’s not true to say that. There are indeed far more neutral and deleterious mutations than beneficial ones (especially neutral ones, at least for humans). The neutral ones accumulate indefinitely while (with rare exceptions) the deleterious ones are eliminated by natural selection.

But that is a blatant oversimplification of what really occurs. What you appear to be ignoring here is that the deleterious mutation has to be visible to natural selection and the vast majority of deleterious mutations are simply NOT visible to natural selection, hence they have absolutely zero possibility of being eliminated!

@glipsnort

Then there’s the separate idea that nearly neutral but very slightly deleterious mutations, ones that have so small an effect that selection can’t eliminate them, are gradually degrading genomes.

Thus, what you are effectively saying is that an encyclopaedia that has millions of typos that don’t get removed will still have just as much useful coded information in it.

@glipsnort

This is Sanford’s ‘genetic entropy’. It’s wrong – it’s contradicted by a bunch of empirical data, has zero evidence in support of it, and makes no sense at all on theoretical grounds.

It would be useful if we could analyse the “bunch of empirical data” you claim falsifies Sanford’s genetic entropy, that I would expect has been observed within the evolutionary paradigm assumptions, to see if what you claim is valid.

What evidence?

I suggest that if what you claim to be evidence is analysed from a Biblical, Creation world view, the claim of falsification of Sanford’s genetic entropy disappears.

Ultimately, this whole conflict is one of biases and worldviews. The question we should all be asking is what is the best bias to be biassed by. We are subject to preconceived notions and I’m certainly no different to anyone else in that regard.

When we start with the Bible and accept the profound truths provided therein, we can practice science very well without having to read in secular myths that are designed to explain origins without God.

God Bless,
jon

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

@adamjedgar

that is simply not the case.

What isn’t the case, Adam? Everything you quoted from James was about people (especially those claiming some scientific expertise) actually be honest, and should be expected to know some of these basic principles of science. Are you against honesty then? Or are you just saying that YECs are unable to live up to those expectations and that it’s unreasonable to expect them to?

@adamjedgar

Whether or not you are willing to accept it, scientists all have presuppositions that they go looking to further.

I haven’t read @jammycakes entire post - but I’ll bet dollars to donuts he isn’t claiming that scientists are free of all presuppositions. What he (and all of us are objecting against) is when young-earthers wish to use the “everybody’s got presuppositions” card as a free pass for themselves to pretend that their opinions then have equal status to those of experts in the relevant fields.

And that just simply isn’t so, Adam. Some opinions are much less informed than others. I’ll continue to place MUCH greater weight on opinions from someone who’s aware of their own presuppositions and how easily they can be fooled and therefore they attend to data and testing, and even changing their mind when they need to because of that data! That is the opinion worth following rather than the relatively more worthless opinion from someone who’s made themselves deaf to any contrary evidence as YECers have.

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@adamjedgar

that is simply not the case. Whether or not you are willing to accept it, scientists all have presuppositions that they go looking to further.

I didn’t say that they don’t. I said that the fact that some of them do is not a free pass to let you reject anything and everything about science that you don’t like.

@adamjedgar

In terms of your claim that true scientists dont exagerate…please explain how it is that the following happened:

I didn’t say that they don’t. I said that the fact that some of them do is not a free pass to let you reject anything and everything about science that you don’t like.

@adamjedgar

I could go on, however, i think my point is made. What Jammycakes has claimed regarding scientists outside of YEC and their supposed lack of bias is simply not correct. We all have our biases according to our predispositioned world view.

I didn’t say that scientists don’t have biases. I said that the fact that some of them do is not a free pass to let you reject anything and everything about science that you don’t like.

You’re arguing that eight different lines of evidence for evolution are incorrect or fraudulent. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your assessment of them is correct. (I’ll leave it to others to argue that point.) But now you have to show that another 999,992 lines of evidence at least were also fraudulent. Moreover, you have to show how many of them could have been falsified in such a way as to give the same wrong answers as each other.

Good luck with that. It’s one thing to show casual fraud being carried out by individual researchers acting independently of each other. It’s a completely different matter to show wholescale, tightly coordinated fraud being carried out on an industrial scale, right across the board, by millions of different researchers, over a period of more than two hundred years.

In any case, scientists are fully aware of their biases. There’s a lot of research that goes into finding ways to counteract the effect of cognitive biases in science. That’s why double blind studies are a thing. There are also statistical methods to detect fraud in scientific datasets. In some studies, different teams work on different parts of the study, with one team designing the study, a second team carrying out the experiment, a third team processing the data, and a fourth team adding secret offsets to the data before it gets processed then removing the offsets from the results, in order to prevent either the data collection team or the data processing team from “anchoring” the results to give them the conclusions that they want.

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

What you appear to be ignoring here is that the deleterious mutation has to be visible to natural selection and the vast majority of deleterious mutations are simply NOT visible to natural selection, hence they have absolutely zero possibility of being eliminated!

Burrawang appears to be oblivious to the meaning of “deleterious mutation”.

[Burrawang]

@rsewell

@Burrawang

What you appear to be ignoring here is that the deleterious mutation has to be visible to natural selection and the vast majority of deleterious mutations are simply NOT visible to natural selection, hence they have absolutely zero possibility of being eliminated!

Burrawang appears to be oblivious to the meaning of “deleterious mutation”.

To be clear here, Deleterious Mutation in the sense that information that was previously present that coded for something useful, but not essential for survival or reproduction.

Things such as cleft palate, hair lip and other birth defects come to mind as obvious examples that everyone knows about but of course there are also a myriad of other less known defects and immunodeficiency errors in the genome and doubtless many more not discovered but relentlessly accumulating. If the individual can reproduce and the other parent has the same error, how can the deleterious mutation be eliminated?

God Bless,
jon

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

To be clear here, Deleterious Mutation in the sense that information that was previously present that coded for something useful, but not essential for survival or reproduction.

GE is incoherent. Please see my topic on Genetic Entropy on this forum.

[St.Roymond]

@jammycakes

I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a while—who are the Hebrew scholars to whom you are referring here? I’d be interested to know what they said.

As I recall one was Maimonides, but he wasn’t alone, just the most prominent. He was 12th century, but I vaguely recall there was someone in the late 9th as well.

The one I had in mind who said millions of years came up with that because he concluded that if a thousand years was an “age” for humans, then it would be a thousand thousand for God, and since God is called “the ancient of days” then the universe must have been around for at least a few ages. It’s a strange sort of thinking to us, but useful to now if only to illustrate how much our understandings of scripture are worldview-dependent, plus how ludicrous it is to assert that everyone must have read Genesis the way the YECists do.

The idea of the universe being tiny then rapidly huge comes from an approach to passages where the first word is broken down by letter and the letters have their own meanings. It’s something I never really got into but has been perfectly acceptable during several periods of history. As I recall it relies on the shape of the first letter, which when properly done has a very tiny fine point on the right then expands almost immediately to be much larger – ב – read of course from right to left. The letter’s name means “house” in at least four ancient languages, for example Akkadian, besides Hebrew. So the meaning is that God was making a house for Himself that started tiny and grew to be vast. The second letter – ר – means “head”, and the third – א – indicates a beginning, so taken together it’s God’s house where God is the head of the beginning.

A book where I came across some of this again recently is In the Beginning . . . We Misunderstood.

[St.Roymond]

@Burrawang

When we start with the Bible

But so far you have rejected doing that: you are starting with a modern worldview’s assumptions about the Bible that ignore the fact that it was written in ancient languages in ancient literary forms under ancient worldviews. You thus violate an extremely basic rule for interpreting any ancient literature, which is not to add anything to it, especially anything from outside the worldview under which it was written.

[St.Roymond]

@Mervin_Bitikofer

young-earthers wish to use the “everybody’s got presuppositions” card as a free pass for themselves to pretend that their opinions then have equal status to those of experts in the relevant fields.

The irony being that conservatives have long derided liberals for doing that very thing.

@jammycakes

There’s a lot of research that goes into finding ways to counteract the effect of cognitive biases in science. That’s why double blind studies are a thing.

It’s why when in geology courses we were given rock samples to date we weren’t told anything about them ahead of time, not location or when they were collected or who collected them.

@rsewell

@Burrawang

What you appear to be ignoring here is that the deleterious mutation has to be visible to natural selection and the vast majority of deleterious mutations are simply NOT visible to natural selection, hence they have absolutely zero possibility of being eliminated!

Burrawang appears to be oblivious to the meaning of “deleterious mutation”.

That’s what I thought but I figured I should let a biologist respond to that.

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@Burrawang

But that is a blatant oversimplification of what really occurs. What you appear to be ignoring here is that the deleterious mutation has to be visible to natural selection and the vast majority of deleterious mutations are simply NOT visible to natural selection, hence they have absolutely zero possibility of being eliminated!

No, I’m not ignoring that – it’s exactly the concept I raise in the next bit you quote. The main problem is that what you have just typed is completely wrong. Note, by the way, that you’re correcting me without any firsthand knowledge at all of population genetics, based entirely on what you’ve read from creationist sources, none of whom have any competence in the field either. Whereas population genetics is a large part of what I do for a living. Sanford’s claims are not sophisticated scientific these; they are genuinely stupid arguments.

@Burrawang

Thus, what you are effectively saying is that an encyclopaedia that has millions of typos that don’t get removed will still have just as much useful coded information in it.

No, I’m saying that a genome that has millions of changes in it will still have just as much useful coded information in it. A genome is not an encyclopedia. Trying to reason by analogy (in this case, by bad analogy) is not going to lead you anywhere good.

@Burrawang

It would be useful if we could analyse the “bunch of empirical data” you claim falsifies Sanford’s genetic entropy, that I would expect has been observed within the evolutionary paradigm assumptions, to see if what you claim is valid.

What evidence?

No. I already gave you evidence the last time you asked for it. You gave an incorrect response and then ignored the evidence, likely because there’s no packaged answer available from a creationist site. So far, you’ve given no one any reason to think you’re at all interested in engaging with real data.

[Burrawang]

@glipsnort

@Burrawang

But that is a blatant oversimplification of what really occurs. What you appear to be ignoring here is that the deleterious mutation has to be visible to natural selection and the vast majority of deleterious mutations are simply NOT visible to natural selection, hence they have absolutely zero possibility of being eliminated!

No, I’m not ignoring that – it’s exactly the concept I raise in the next bit you quote. The main problem is that what you have just typed is completely wrong. Note, by the way, that you’re correcting me without any firsthand knowledge at all of population genetics, based entirely on what you’ve read from creationist sources, none of whom have any competence in the field either. Whereas population genetics is a large part of what I do for a living. Sanford’s claims are not sophisticated scientific these; they are genuinely stupid arguments.

But you most definitely are doing precisely that!
Firstly, how/why do you claim to know what I do and don’t know? We have never met or corresponded as far as I am aware except on this forum. I can only conclude, fishing at best or an attempt at brow beating.
The whole point that I stated in my post is that ones presuppositions, biases or worldview, call it what you will, will greatly affect the conclusions that you draw.

@glipsnort

@Burrawang

Thus, what you are effectively saying is that an encyclopaedia that has millions of typos that don’t get removed will still have just as much useful coded information in it.

No, I’m saying that a genome that has millions of changes in it will still have just as much useful coded information in it. A genome is not an encyclopedia. Trying to reason by analogy (in this case, by bad analogy) is not going to lead you anywhere good.

Of course a genome is not an encyclopaedia, it is a poor comparison granted, but it serves the purpose I intended quite well.
But don’t you see, that regardless of the number of changes that damage the information in a finite system as in the genome, and it would be in the millions and quite possibly billions, the genome will certainly NOT have as much useful coded information in it at any point along the way as each generation is less fit than the previous because those changes have accumulated from mutations such as transpositions, deletions and insertions, typos if you will and of course have compounded to the point we are at right now in the present.

If you start with a near ‘perfect’ genome as I suggest Adam would have had, (hence the long lifespans), and entropy has been incessantly working on the genomes of all generations since then to the point now that many, many thousands of genetic diseases are a real empirical fact in the human population, it is not difficult to see that there will NOT be as much useful coded information in it as you so confidently claim, that’s just plain obvious! At least it is obvious to me with my Biblical worldview of the world we see around us in the present.
To make that claim as you have that the amount of useful information remains constant when it clearly cannot possibly be, I think that I would be fairly safe in assuming that your belief is based on evidence interpreted within an evolutionary framework; evidence which you are it seems, unwilling to provide.

So you work in the field, so what! That doesn’t mean for a millisecond the evolutionary framework within which you work and through which you draw your conclusions is correct.

God Bless
Your brother in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus,
jon

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

Things such as cleft palate, hair lip and other birth defects come to mind as obvious examples that everyone knows about but of course there are also a myriad of other less known defects and immunodeficiency errors in the genome and doubtless many more not discovered but relentlessly accumulating. If the individual can reproduce and the other parent has the same error, how can the deleterious mutation be eliminated?

You are confused. Just because an individual is encumbered with survivable condition does not mean it isn’t a selectable trait. They can still on average be out competed for resources and mates. Thus, deleterious mutations, whether caused by single or multiple mutations, tend to clear from the gene pool by natural and sexual selection, depending on other scaling factors.

@Burrawang

how/why do you claim to know what I do and don’t know?

It is clear from your posts that you know virtually nothing of population genetics and are in no position to lecture others. If you want to improve your grasp of the subject, you could begin by taking direction from Steve. If you rather think you have a coherent grasp of the subject, please inform us as to why rodents and flies are still with us, or did you read my post?

[Burrawang]

@rsewell

@Burrawang

Things such as cleft palate, hair lip and other birth defects come to mind as obvious examples that everyone knows about but of course there are also a myriad of other less known defects and immunodeficiency errors in the genome and doubtless many more not discovered but relentlessly accumulating. If the individual can reproduce and the other parent has the same error, how can the deleterious mutation be eliminated?

You are confused. Just because an individual is encumbered with survivable condition does not mean it isn’t a selectable trait. They can still on average be out competed for resources and mates. Thus, deleterious mutations, whether caused by single or multiple mutations, tend to clear from the gene pool by natural and sexual selection, depending on other scaling factors.

No, it is not I that am confused here!
You mean that’s what you think or perhaps more succinctly ‘guess’ must be the case because you interpret what you see within an evolutionary framework. Try interpreting the facts from a traditional Biblical framework and see what you come up with.
But if the many thousands of genetic errors are truly all selectable and of sufficient deleterious effect to be visible to natural selection, then why do we have such inordinately massive numbers of people who have these genetically transmitted diseases and biological construction errors if they are as you suggest, “deleterious mutations, whether caused by single or multiple mutations, tend to clear from the gene pool by natural and sexual selection, depending on other scaling factors.”
Well that’s a nice story with more than a bit of wishful thinking thrown in, but the reality is that the majority of people with these genetically caused diseases etc. pass them on to the next generation.
It is a falsehood to say that they are eliminated! Sure a tiny fraction of the most severe mutational genetic damage will certainly be eliminated, but by and large it is NOT survival of the fittest, it is reproduction of the luckiest, or the richest, or the biggest ego or any number of other factors that simply don’t fit into the nicely packaged evolution fairy tale.

It appears that you are just not hearing what I’m talking about! The vast majority of genetic mutations that as far as I know don’t prevent survival or reproductive ability of the individual and have become established in the population. They may be minor or they may be severe genetically transmitted diseases that may cause difficulties for the individual in many cases, but don’t prevent the person from parenting children.
Hence they are not lost from the gene pool at all, in fact as time progresses and more and more generations are born, the number of genetically transmitted diseases increases.

God Bless,
jon

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

This from another forum…

Remember, genetic entropy is real, but junk DNA is not. Somehow.

So, if GE is real, why are rodents, flies, and zebra fish still with us, let alone microbes such as bacteria?

@Burrawang

it is reproduction of the luckiest, or the richest, or the biggest ego or any number of other factors that simply don’t fit into the nicely packaged evolution fairy tale.

That is drift, and occupies a great deal of attention by population geneticists. Evolutionary theory is developed to reflect nature, not to be imposed on nature.