While having lunch at ICC 2013 with biologist and genetic engineer Robert Carter and the unnamed evolutionary biologist who got laughed off stage (let us call him Erik), I raised a question which the evolutionary biologist and other Darwinists (including Michael Lynch) have not provided satisfactory answers for, namely, “what is the evolutionary simulation that will resolve problems of speed limits of evolution, cost of substitution, rate of substitution, neutral evolution, Haldane’s dilemma, Muller’s ratchet, Haldane’s ratchet, Kondrashov’s question, mutational meltdown, etc?”
John Sanford, Walter ReMine, John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, Robert Carter, others created Mendel’s Accountant. Erik kept lambasting the program, “did you model recombination, do you model variable population sizes, do you model linkage, synergistic epistasis, truncation selection, heterozygous advantage, etc.” To Erik’s astonishment, Robert Carter said, “yes”. Erik was horrified, since he was so sure there had to have been some flaw in Mendel’s Accountant because Darwinism can’t be false. Erik knew we had him up against the ropes in this discussion. Erik gave the standard Darwinist line, “Haldane was wrong because he used unrealistic parameters.”
I then said to Erik, “Ok, can you tell me what software evolutionary biologists use to answer these questions? What results do you get when you use realistic parameters?” Erik look stunned! 😯 I called his bluff. He said, “I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s out there.” Wish I had a photo of the look on his face. A picture is worth a thousand words. 🙂
Walter ReMiine made the same observation. Walter wrote Michael Lynch to ask, and Lynch said there weren’t any. Jody Hey at Rutgers has a simulation, but it doesn’t have the depth of Mendel’s Accountant. Further, Walter got a hold of Hey’s public domain program and discovered an interesting bug (feature).
Hey uses the standard evolutionist trick or renormalizing the fittest individual for every generation. What this means is suppose the children on average are sicker than the parents — in this case, functionally speaking the next generation is less fit than the parents, but using Enron-like accounting, Hey’s program simply renormalizes the notion of “fittest” to the fittest of the sick kids, not the fittest relative to the healthier parents. (I delved into this less-than-honest equivocation in Death of the Fittest.) When ReMine set the default to non-renormalization, the populations went extinct!
So, I’m calling all Darwinists, what is your software and what are your results:
1. What is the speed of substitution through natural selection under realistic parameters. Haldane says 1 trait per 300 generations for human populations. What is your figure? I asked Erik that same question, and he was evasive. So Darwinists, what is your figure? The human genome has 3 giga base pairs, how many of these per generation can be evolved via selection versus drift?
2. If there are N deleterious mutations per individual, how are they purified out of the genome without causing extinction. For 6 deleterious mutations per individual, using the Poisson distribution, I calculate a human female will have to make over 800 kids in addition to truncation selection. So how is genetic deterioration arrested except through the Enron-like accounting trick of renormalization?
3. What is the fixation rate of slightly deleterious mutations?
4. What is the accumulation of harmful mutations that aren’t fixed? I predicted it would be on the order of N for N harmful mutations per individual or some proportion of N (like 0.5 N).
So Darwinists, what is your software, and what are your results? I’d think if evolutionary theory is so scientific, it shouldn’t be the creationists making these simulations, but evolutionary biologists! So what is your software, what are your figures, and what are your parameters. And please don’t cite Nunney, who claims to have solved Haldane’s dilemma but refuses to let his software and assumptions and procedures be scrutinized in the public domain. At least Hey was more forthright, but unfortunately Hey’s software affirmed the results of Mendel’s accountant.
As I’ve said, Mendel’s Accountant affirms what is already well accepted in evolutionary literature, except that it goes a step further and shows where it will lead (not in favor of Darwinism). See: If not Rupe and Sanford, would you rather believe Wiki?.
So the Darwinists keep lambasting Mendel’s Accountant. Fine, where is the Darwinist software and what are the answers to the above questions? Here is your chance to shine, guys.