I said:
6days responded:
To support his contention that accumulating mutations will inexorably lead to extinction, 6days provides quotes from several papers authored by prominent mainstream scientists.
Before examining the quotes 6days provides, I want to note that I have tried to get 6days to actually read the papers he quotes from. I realize that would entail actually chasing down where the papers can be accessed. Accessing some of the papers on-line may require a fee if you do not already have a subscription to the journal the paper was published in. I suspect most universities who offer courses in genetics will already have the journals archived in their libraries, and the articles can be copied for a minimal cost. However, I can’t see that 6days has any interest in or intention of doing more than mindlessly passing on whatever quotes he finds to his liking in creationist literature. He usually provides no links to the articles the quotes come from, and seldom presents quotes that are not readily available from creationist sources.
Of particular relevance here is a book from a creationist named John Sanford. I have Sanford’s book, and I have strong suspicions that 6days does too. Sanford’s book can best be described a Bible of quote mines extracted from scientific papers dealing with genetics. But if 6days is going to continue to rely on second-hand sources for his quotes, he has to be willing to man up and take responsibility when they turn out to be fallacious.
To show that “geneticists agree” that accumulating slightly deleterious mutations will lead to extinction, 6days offers this quote from J. V. Neel.
(Not unexpectedly, this exact quote from Neel is in the tome of quote mines from Sanford.)
J. V. Neel was a prominent early American Geneticist, and responsible for establishing a department of genetics at the University of Michigan. (Incidentally, years ago I spent several days accompanying a patient who underwent a rare and serious surgery for a genetic problem. That surgery (successful) was performed in the hospital in Ann Arbor that is co-located with and affiliated with the department that Neel was the head of.)
Neel was part of a US team that did one of the first in-depth studies of the effects of the Hiroshima bomb on Japanese children born after WW II.
The paper by J. V. Neel that 6day’s quote comes from was published in 1985 and is titled:
And can be accessed through
Now if 6days had actually read the paper he might have seen this relevant information near the front:
Neel’s paper was specifically focused on studying genetic mutations in children born to atomic bomb survivors. When Neel speaks of our species accommodating “such mutation rates”, the rates he is speaking of are the rates of mutations of people exposed to atomic bomb radiation, not to the accumulation of VSDMs. (Creationists can’t read.)
The next scientists that 6days quotes from (again found in Sanford’s book) are geneticists Kevin Higgins and Michael Lynch, at the U of Oregon, in a 2000 paper titled “Metapopulation extinction caused by mutation accumulation”, direct link to free PDF copy is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/98/5/2928.full.pdf.
Let’s start by looking at the abstract the authors provided to their paper. In the abstract, they are a bit less absolutist than 6days, when they say
Scattered throughout the article itself you will see a number of caveats to extinction (but for some reason those statements didn’t get selected for inclusion in Sanford’s book). I recommend those who honestly want some first-hand familiarity with the article take the time to go through it. A modest comfort level with mathematics and technical terms will be needed if you want to get into the core ideas of the article.
Now I will skip to the last sentence Higgins and Lynch close with, and see how well it comports with 6day’s claim that these authors agree that accumulating slightly deleterious mutations will lead to extinction. They are summarizing extinction due to what they call “habitat fragmentation”:
Now moving on to 6days’ next attempt to portray geneticists as seeing extinction as a certainty, we find him again turning to Sanford’s quote mine book and misrepresenting Dr. James F. Crow, who was a geneticist at the U of Wisconsin. Dr. Crow’s article is available at http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8380.full.
Here is what 6days quotes from Crow on mutation rates:
The ellipses in the middle of the quote are where Sanford (and 6days) omit some interesting text (though I doubt 6days knew what that omitted text said). Here is the full quote with the excised text in bold:
Notice how 6day’s and Sanford’s omission turns Crow’s suggestion about mutation rates in fruit flies into a factual declaration about mutation rates in humans.
Beyond what 6days presented from Crow’s article, here are a couple of relevant passages in the article that I see:
How well does that comport with 6days assertion that we are limited to “about 200 generations of mutations”?
Crow also says:
Of significant relevance to 6days using Sanford’s quotes from Crow’s paper is that almost a decade ago, shortly after Sanford’s book went to press, a fellow name Dean Anderson contacted Dr. Crow regarding his quotes being used in Sanford’s book. Here is Dr. Crow’s reply to Dean Anderson:
If 6days continues to represent Crow as saying a trend towards extinction due to mutation accumulation is support for Genesis, then 6days is jettisoning any pretense that truth matters to him. A final note on Crow’s paper – it was actually the result of a talk that Crow gave, and so is largely free of mathematics and advanced terminology. It is one of the best papers I have seen that provides some fascinating insights into genetic and mutations, while keeping the presentation at a level that an average person with a modest scientific background can grasp.
(And Crow made mention of some specific studies in the paper that stopped me dead in my tracks. Why I was so impacted is for some other time.)
If 6days responds to this post with a new collection of quotes, I would ask that he show that he has actually read the articles, and provides links to where they can be accessed.
In his response to my prior post, 6days elected to simply ignore a number of points I raised in it. Prior experience has shown that he will simply disregard responding on subjects that he has already found he was wrong on. Inasmuch as I have no control over what subject he will engage, I am thinking of compiling and posting a moderately definitive list of arguments that he has chosen to run away from.
6days responded:
To support his contention that accumulating mutations will inexorably lead to extinction, 6days provides quotes from several papers authored by prominent mainstream scientists.
Before examining the quotes 6days provides, I want to note that I have tried to get 6days to actually read the papers he quotes from. I realize that would entail actually chasing down where the papers can be accessed. Accessing some of the papers on-line may require a fee if you do not already have a subscription to the journal the paper was published in. I suspect most universities who offer courses in genetics will already have the journals archived in their libraries, and the articles can be copied for a minimal cost. However, I can’t see that 6days has any interest in or intention of doing more than mindlessly passing on whatever quotes he finds to his liking in creationist literature. He usually provides no links to the articles the quotes come from, and seldom presents quotes that are not readily available from creationist sources.
Of particular relevance here is a book from a creationist named John Sanford. I have Sanford’s book, and I have strong suspicions that 6days does too. Sanford’s book can best be described a Bible of quote mines extracted from scientific papers dealing with genetics. But if 6days is going to continue to rely on second-hand sources for his quotes, he has to be willing to man up and take responsibility when they turn out to be fallacious.
To show that “geneticists agree” that accumulating slightly deleterious mutations will lead to extinction, 6days offers this quote from J. V. Neel.
(Not unexpectedly, this exact quote from Neel is in the tome of quote mines from Sanford.)
J. V. Neel was a prominent early American Geneticist, and responsible for establishing a department of genetics at the University of Michigan. (Incidentally, years ago I spent several days accompanying a patient who underwent a rare and serious surgery for a genetic problem. That surgery (successful) was performed in the hospital in Ann Arbor that is co-located with and affiliated with the department that Neel was the head of.)
Neel was part of a US team that did one of the first in-depth studies of the effects of the Hiroshima bomb on Japanese children born after WW II.
The paper by J. V. Neel that 6day’s quote comes from was published in 1985 and is titled:
The rate with which spontaneous mutation alters the electrophoretic mobility of polypeptides
And can be accessed through
Now if 6days had actually read the paper he might have seen this relevant information near the front:
In a previous report in these PROCEEDINGS we have described the protocol and the preliminary results of a search for mutations altering the electrophoretic behavior of a series of proteins, in children of atomic bomb survivors and a suitable group of control children (1). This study has now been completed. In the present report we describe the spontaneous mutation rate observed in the so-called control children of that study-i.e., children both of whose parents were more than 2500 meters from the hypocenter at the time of the bombings or one of whose parents was at this distance and the other was not in the city.
… Altogether, 10,609 children of distally exposed parents living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been examined with respect to the occurrence of rare electrophoretic variants
… Altogether, 10,609 children of distally exposed parents living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been examined with respect to the occurrence of rare electrophoretic variants
Neel’s paper was specifically focused on studying genetic mutations in children born to atomic bomb survivors. When Neel speaks of our species accommodating “such mutation rates”, the rates he is speaking of are the rates of mutations of people exposed to atomic bomb radiation, not to the accumulation of VSDMs. (Creationists can’t read.)
The next scientists that 6days quotes from (again found in Sanford’s book) are geneticists Kevin Higgins and Michael Lynch, at the U of Oregon, in a 2000 paper titled “Metapopulation extinction caused by mutation accumulation”, direct link to free PDF copy is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/98/5/2928.full.pdf.
Let’s start by looking at the abstract the authors provided to their paper. In the abstract, they are a bit less absolutist than 6days, when they say
… we show that metapopulation structure, habitat loss or fragmentation, and environmental stochasticity can be expected to greatly accelerate the accumulation of mildly deleterious mutations, lowering the genetic effective size to such a degree that even large metapopulations may be at risk of extinction. Because of mutation accumulation, viable metapopulations may need to be far larger and better connected than would be required under just stochastic demography.
Scattered throughout the article itself you will see a number of caveats to extinction (but for some reason those statements didn’t get selected for inclusion in Sanford’s book). I recommend those who honestly want some first-hand familiarity with the article take the time to go through it. A modest comfort level with mathematics and technical terms will be needed if you want to get into the core ideas of the article.
Now I will skip to the last sentence Higgins and Lynch close with, and see how well it comports with 6day’s claim that these authors agree that accumulating slightly deleterious mutations will lead to extinction. They are summarizing extinction due to what they call “habitat fragmentation”:
…there might be sufficient time for habitat remediation that would presumably restore efficient selection against deleterious mutations.
Now moving on to 6days’ next attempt to portray geneticists as seeing extinction as a certainty, we find him again turning to Sanford’s quote mine book and misrepresenting Dr. James F. Crow, who was a geneticist at the U of Wisconsin. Dr. Crow’s article is available at http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8380.full.
Here is what 6days quotes from Crow on mutation rates:
The ellipses in the middle of the quote are where Sanford (and 6days) omit some interesting text (though I doubt 6days knew what that omitted text said). Here is the full quote with the excised text in bold:
It seems clear that for the past few centuries harmful mutations have been accumulating. Why don’t we notice this? If we are like Drosophila, the decrease in viability from mutation accumulation is some 1 or 2% per generation.
Notice how 6day’s and Sanford’s omission turns Crow’s suggestion about mutation rates in fruit flies into a factual declaration about mutation rates in humans.
Beyond what 6days presented from Crow’s article, here are a couple of relevant passages in the article that I see:
recessive mutations may persist for thousands of generations.
How well does that comport with 6days assertion that we are limited to “about 200 generations of mutations”?
Crow also says:
Natural selection, acting in a way that seems reasonable for both fly and human populations can indeed pick off several mutations at once.
Of significant relevance to 6days using Sanford’s quotes from Crow’s paper is that almost a decade ago, shortly after Sanford’s book went to press, a fellow name Dean Anderson contacted Dr. Crow regarding his quotes being used in Sanford’s book. Here is Dr. Crow’s reply to Dean Anderson:
Dear Dean Anderson,
Here are my point-by-point comments on the comments of the Young Earth Creationist,
Harmful mutations occur every generation, but are eliminated by natural selection. Although most mutations are harmful, some are favorable and these are retained and increased by natural selection. This has been going on for billions of years.
I suggested in the article that in recent years, as a result of environmental improvement, the effect of natural selection was diminished. If this is correct, there are probably more harmful mutations in the population than there were a thousand or so years ago. The reason we don’t notice this is because we have greatly improved living conditions so that mutations that would have been harmful at an earlier time are much less so now.
If my conjecture is correct, our ancestors of a few hundred to a few thousand years ago would have had more mutations than we do. This does not mean that they were stronger, fitter, or more fertile. They lived in a time of great environmental stress and would have been less strong, less fit, and less fertile than we are, thanks to the fact that our life is a lot easier than that of our ancestors.
My comments had to do with only the recent past (a few thousand years). In the long run, harmful mutations are eliminated by natural selection. Both mutations and natural selection have been going on since life began, billions of years ago.
My work (and my conjecture) offer no support for the Genesis account.
They are entirely consistent with the neo-Darwinian theory.
I hope this is useful. I would welcome your comments.
Sincerely, James F. Crow
Here are my point-by-point comments on the comments of the Young Earth Creationist,
Harmful mutations occur every generation, but are eliminated by natural selection. Although most mutations are harmful, some are favorable and these are retained and increased by natural selection. This has been going on for billions of years.
I suggested in the article that in recent years, as a result of environmental improvement, the effect of natural selection was diminished. If this is correct, there are probably more harmful mutations in the population than there were a thousand or so years ago. The reason we don’t notice this is because we have greatly improved living conditions so that mutations that would have been harmful at an earlier time are much less so now.
If my conjecture is correct, our ancestors of a few hundred to a few thousand years ago would have had more mutations than we do. This does not mean that they were stronger, fitter, or more fertile. They lived in a time of great environmental stress and would have been less strong, less fit, and less fertile than we are, thanks to the fact that our life is a lot easier than that of our ancestors.
My comments had to do with only the recent past (a few thousand years). In the long run, harmful mutations are eliminated by natural selection. Both mutations and natural selection have been going on since life began, billions of years ago.
My work (and my conjecture) offer no support for the Genesis account.
They are entirely consistent with the neo-Darwinian theory.
I hope this is useful. I would welcome your comments.
Sincerely, James F. Crow
If 6days continues to represent Crow as saying a trend towards extinction due to mutation accumulation is support for Genesis, then 6days is jettisoning any pretense that truth matters to him. A final note on Crow’s paper – it was actually the result of a talk that Crow gave, and so is largely free of mathematics and advanced terminology. It is one of the best papers I have seen that provides some fascinating insights into genetic and mutations, while keeping the presentation at a level that an average person with a modest scientific background can grasp.
(And Crow made mention of some specific studies in the paper that stopped me dead in my tracks. Why I was so impacted is for some other time.)
If 6days responds to this post with a new collection of quotes, I would ask that he show that he has actually read the articles, and provides links to where they can be accessed.
In his response to my prior post, 6days elected to simply ignore a number of points I raised in it. Prior experience has shown that he will simply disregard responding on subjects that he has already found he was wrong on. Inasmuch as I have no control over what subject he will engage, I am thinking of compiling and posting a moderately definitive list of arguments that he has chosen to run away from.
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