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.
He won't do it. He neither understands nor possesses any of these papers.
It wasn't that long ago that I went through this same exercise with 6days on the topic of pseudogenes. Just like here, he quoted a handful of papers and claimed they contradicted evolutionary theory and supported the "Biblical model" (whatever that is). And just like you have done, I accessed those papers, read them, and showed exactly how 6days was dishonestly misrepresenting them. In at least one case, the paper had an entire section entitled "Evolution and Pseudogenes" where they described how all the work they were describing had only been possible via the understanding of evolutionary common ancestry (it told them what to compare, where to look, and what to look for). Yet 6days tried to claim it as supporting "the Biblical model" and contradicting evolution!
Seriously, the guy doesn't have an honest bone in his body.
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.
Oh sure....he likes Sanford a lot. And I like him too, given how he is a very good illustration of how productive evolutionary theory is and how utterly useless creationism is.
Sanford’s book can best be described a Bible of quote mines extracted from scientific papers dealing with genetics.
So basically what you've done here is shown that not only is 6days fundamentally dishonest, Sanford is as well.
Well done. :up:
Neel’s paper was specifically focused on studying genetic mutations in children born to atomic bomb survivors.
So both 6days and Sanford lied about the paper.
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.
I actually know Dr. Lynch (professionally, not personally) and have attended a few of his workshops. Looking over the paper 6days cited and knowing the world in which Lynch works, it's obvious that he is not talking about humans and instead is talking about conservation biology and management. For example, the discussion states...
"
Early work suggested that demography is usually of more immediate importance to biological conservation than population genetics in determining the minimum viable sizes of wild populations."
So it's obvious what that paper is about (it ain't humans) and that 6days and Sanford are again lying.
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.
And keep in mind too that he's actually talking about salmonid population structures (metapopulations vs. panmictic populations). But of course neither Sanford nor 6days bothered to mention that part.
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.
And if anyone thinks habitat fragmentation is an issue for humans, well....they need to stop and give it a second thought.
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.
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).
Again, well done.
You've conclusively shown once again that 6days and his sources are nothing more than habitual, unrepentant liars.
As long as that remains the case, IMO we need to keep pointing that fact out. They are lying....
constantly, and until they stop there's no reason to take anything they say at all seriously.
I mean....how many times does one person have to be busted lying before you conclude he's simply a pathological liar?