John Sanford doubles down on his Genetic Entropy idiocy.

[Juvenal]

From what I understand there are ancient records in Sumeria, and I think Egypt as well with kings have drastically longer lifespans long ago. I'm going to have to look up the source material though.

Dear C,

You'll find the "drastically longer lifespans" in the Sumerian King List correspond with pre-literate and inter-literate periods, either before the development of writing or during periods of foreign incursions that disrupted the empire. Periods with written rather than oral records trend back to believable lifespans. Periods preserved from oral histories likely include concurrent rather than consecutive kingdoms.

Moreover, the oral history lifespans denote relative prestige rather than actual age. Further issues arise from translation from the Sumerian's hybrid numbering system which is principally positional in base 60 but interspersed with 1s and 10s.

As ever, Jesse

[sfs1]

It's too bad that people like Beagle Boy, Santa Klaus, sfs1 and the many other Biblical Creationist enemies here on TWeb don't do as I did - contact John Sanford and humbly ask for an audience. I'm willing to bet that he will oblige them. Then they can finally know what they are talking about.

Alternatively, Sanford could have contacted me, or any other population geneticist or evolutionary biologist, and humbly asked one of us for an audience. I'm willing to be that many would have obliged him. Then he could have avoided the silliness of his genetic entropy business. (Incidentally, I did contact Sanford by email and communicate with him that way.) Why the novice should be the one granting the audience (interesting choice of words), or why anyone should be going cap in hand and begging permission to talk to someone else is really odd.

[HMS_Beagle]

Strange that one of the finest universities in the world so egregiously rejects modern science.

K54

Oops! My flubber fingers strike again!

[klaus54]

A few more thoughts on Sanford's idiocy:

It's incredibly dumb to claim one genome is not as good as another 6000 years earlier because evolutionary fitness can only be measured against reproductive success in your current environment. Right now there are over 7 billion humans on the planet, over three orders of magnitude more than 6000 years ago. We are the most wildly successful large vertebrate species the planet has ever seen. If you are born now your probability of having offspring is higher than it ever was in known human history. By that criteria the human genome is fitter than the one 6000 years ago. Keep in mind that out high tech world with medicines, sanitation, and hospitals is our environment just as the pond created by the beaver dam is the beaver's environment.

Whales are spectacularly successful in their current environment just as their land dwelling ancestors were successful in theirs. But drop an extant whale onto land and it's toast in minutes. The whale genome didn't degrade, it merely evolved to become different but equally as good in its new environment.

Sanford is certainly free to make up his own pet definition of fitness, but the the scientific community is also free to laugh at him then ignore him. Which is pretty much the way it happened.

It's incredibly dumb to claim any book is 100% historically accurate just because parts of it are historically accurate. That's like claiming Sherlock Holmes must be a real person because Scotland Yard is a real place.

Stanford's rejection of all the many verified and uncontroversial scientific dating methods shows just how out of touch with reality he is. Like many YECs he started with his conclusion then fudged or ignored every last piece of data until he got what he aimed for. That's not science, that's foolish fanaticism. Nothing could highlight this point better than his sad new paper in the OP.

Strange that one of the finest universities in the world so egregiously rejects modern science.

K54

[Jorge]

Moderated By: Littlejoe

Jorge, you have been asked to leave the thread. Please do not post any further in this thread without express permission from the thread owner. Any future posts will be deleted without further discussion.

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publicly complain or whine, please take it to the Padded Room unless told otherwise.

Oops ... I hadn't seen this before my last post. Just delete that post. Sayonara!

Jorge

[Jorge]

• Edited by a Moderator •

[sparc]

If Sanford really thinks of the Bible as a source of scientific data why then didn't he refer to it in Biological Information: New Perspectives?
The fact that he tries to corroborate his genetic entropy argument with stories from the bible when preaching to the choir clearly shows that it doesn't make any sense to discuss genetic entropy in scientific terms.

[HMS_Beagle]

A few more thoughts on Sanford's idiocy:

It's incredibly dumb to claim one genome is not as good as another 6000 years earlier because evolutionary fitness can only be measured against reproductive success in your current environment. Right now there are over 7 billion humans on the planet, over three orders of magnitude more than 6000 years ago. We are the most wildly successful large vertebrate species the planet has ever seen. If you are born now your probability of having offspring is higher than it ever was in known human history. By that criteria the human genome is fitter than the one 6000 years ago. Keep in mind that out high tech world with medicines, sanitation, and hospitals is our environment just as the pond created by the beaver dam is the beaver's environment.

Whales are spectacularly successful in their current environment just as their land dwelling ancestors were successful in theirs. But drop an extant whale onto land and it's toast in minutes. The whale genome didn't degrade, it merely evolved to become different but equally as good in its new environment.

Sanford is certainly free to make up his own pet definition of fitness, but the the scientific community is also free to laugh at him then ignore him. Which is pretty much the way it happened.

It's incredibly dumb to claim any book is 100% historically accurate just because parts of it are historically accurate. That's like claiming Sherlock Holmes must be a real person because Scotland Yard is a real place.

Stanford's rejection of all the many verified and uncontroversial scientific dating methods shows just how out of touch with reality he is. Like many YECs he started with his conclusion then fudged or ignored every last piece of data until he got what he aimed for. That's not science, that's foolish fanaticism. Nothing could highlight this point better than his sad new paper in the OP.

[Littlejoe]

Moderated By: Littlejoe

Jorge, you have been asked to leave the thread. Please do not post any further in this thread without express permission from the thread owner. Any future posts will be deleted without further discussion.

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publicly complain or whine, please take it to the Padded Room unless told otherwise.

[HMS_Beagle]

crap from banned poster snipped

Jorge

Post reported for campus decorum violation.

Moderators, please delete post #21 from this thread as the poster was already informed he was banned for insults.

If he continues to ignore the ban please consider banning him from all of NS301.

[klaus54]

1) What does it mean for Creation to be "perfect"? Could you please regale us with an unambiguous definition? BTW, the Hebrew word for "perfect" is not used in the Genesis stories.

2) Archaeological evidence refutes these long life spans.

3) With such a small non-random sample, how would "average" make any sense for inference to the population?

If you don't have the time to address all 3 of these, please address #1 since it's the most relevant to theological basis of Sanford's model.

K54

P.S. In your explanation and defense of Sanford's work beware not to "add to Scripture".

[Jorge]

1. Where is your evidence that the human genome was "perfect" with an evolutionary fitness of 1.0 at a time 6000 years ago? That is a completely unjustified assumption by Sanford, one of the many fatal flaws in his work.

Wrong. Based on a 'perfect' creation about 6,000 years ago, it is not a bad assumption at all - in fact, it is perfectly logical. In any event, go ahead and take that assumption as "wrong". Then the genome would then have began worse than his model starts with. The point is that his assumption makes sense in light of the present state of decay of the genome and the fact that we haven't degraded into oblivion.

2. Where is your evidence that the average age of people 6000 years ago was vastly higher (i.e 900 years old) than today? There is zero physical evidence of such a thing happening and plenty of evidence the average life back then was short and brutal, averaging less than 30 years.

If one takes the Bible as an historical record (as you may not know, the Bible's historical accuracy has been demonstrated hundreds of times) then one must accept genealogical chronology every bit as much as one accepts the other historical elements. You can't just throw things out because you don't like what it implies.

3. Absolute age is not a measure of evolutionary fitness. Fitness is a measure of reproductive success in your current environment. A man who dies at 30 after leaving 2 offspring was more fit evolution-wise than a 100 year old man who dies childless.

Yeah, maybe. But you are using Neo-Darwinian criteria and definitions and logic. Sanford is employing different criteria. Read his work and become educated - afterwards your critiques will mean more.

4. How do you justify ignoring all the evidence we have that human civilization has been around a lot longer than 6000 years? We have cities that date back to 8000 BC, cave art that dates back to 30,000 BC, clothes and jewelry that dates back to 70,000 BC.

Self-fulfilling and self-verifying. A great deal of work has been published where the accuracy of the dates you cite here are called into question. Many people - including JS and myself - do not accept those dates as real. You cannot use controversial dates as a valid criterion in a rebuttal.

Fair warning: Sparko, Rogue06, and Bill are right. This place would be a lot better if it was more civil. Any insults by you will be reported and you will be banned from the thread.

I will not break the 'truce'. Just don't start classifying as an "insult" whenever I say some truths that you either dislike or disagree with. If you do that then you will be "insulted" quickly and often - perhaps right now.

Jorge

[Carrikature]

Sanford explicitly states that he is excluding the effects of infant mortality from his figures.

Roy

Sort of. His exclusion is purely for the average lifespan in Roman times, but he goes on to claim a steady lifespan post-empire that fluctuates based on child mortality rates. It's not all consistent.

Source: Figure 2

The lifespans of the Noah and his descendants, based upon the Masoretic text. As can be seen, at the time of the Flood lifespans began to plummet, but in a very systematic way. See table 1 to learn the specific Patriarchs and their ages. The last data point shown is the average life expectancy (45 years) during the time of the Roman Empire (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy). This statistic excludes childhood deaths before age 10. From Roman times until recent advances in nutrition and medicine, human life expectancy has hovered in this range of 30-50 years (depending on variables such as childhood mortality). Note: The ages at death for Sarah, Ishmael, Levi, and Aaron were included in the scatterplot. However, since these individuals were in the same generation as Abram, Isaac, Joseph, and Moses respectively, they confounded the calculation of the trendline, and so were not included in the trendline calculation.

© Copyright Original Source

Unfortunately for him, he has provided no data from which to establish an average lifespan in the time of the patriarchs.

[Roy]

Genetic Entropy Recorded in the Bible?

It scores a 4 on the usual scale, due to Sanford's incorrect definition of 'genome', and it would score less but for the illustration at the top of the first page.

There are quite a lot of problems with Sanford's work even if the reliance on Biblical dates is ignored:
- How did Sanford determine how many generations there were from David to the average Roman?
- Why does the post-flood graph include Noah and Shem, who were born pre-flood and thus would not have had their genomes corrupted by it?
- Why would lifespan correlate so closely with genetic load?
- How can Sanford claim both that he has modelled a biologically realistic population and that his simulation can't handle historically accurate populations?

But the real problem with Sanford's paper is that if his technique and data are valid, the natural life expectancy of adults today is twenty-five. Furthermore, the natural life expectancy of adults would have been below thirty for centuries, so there's no way of excusing this discrepancy as being a result of modern hygiene and medicine. This alone is enough to blow Sanford's theories to smithereens.

Roy

[HMS_Beagle]

Sure but you've taken some of the 'fun' out of it.

I mean, annoying the monkeys is part of the joy of going to the zoo.

But ... okay ... I can be a 'stuffed shirt'. Watch ... I'll be good.

Jorge

You were warned. This post has been reported and you are now banned from this thread.