I'll start by thanking you for an unusually clear exposition of the ID position that you are promoting. That's a lot better than the muddy thinking that often shows up in posts supporting ID.
AlphaOmegakid writes:Now natural selection works at the phenotype with individual organisms. As phenotypes gain these slightly deleterious mutations, there is a selective pressure against these mutations, but basically all of the organisms have them, so they cant' be differentiated at the organism level. They are like noise in the population. Therefore, they don't get selected out on average. So the next generation has more mutations which many more are nearly neutral. The worst offenders are selected out, but on average the population carries the mutations. Also don't forget that many mutations are recessive, so they don't show up in the phenotye. The population will also carry the recessive negative alleles, because NS can't see them.
Let me summarize what I see you to be describing as the ID position:
A kind starts out as the result of a design. It starts out matching some sort of ideal conceived by the designer. But, over time, there are deleterious mutations that build up. Thus the kind deteriorates over time.
Here's the summary of how I see it, and I presume this to be close to the evolutionist view:
There is no need for a species to be optimal. Suboptimal is just fine, provided only that it produces enough offspring so that the population remains approximately stable in size. So the accumulation of what you consider to be slightly deleterious mutations is not actually a problem. There is no ideal that the genetics of the species could match. Rather, it's a pragmatic process of doing well enough for the population to persist.
Reality can be a harsh place. A food source can disappear. A new predator can show up. With these changes, your ideal kind might be unable to survive. So it dies out. However, the evolutionists species has picked up all of these slightly deleterious mutations, which we see as genetic variation within the population. Some of these variants, while slightly less capable in the previous environment, may find themselves far better able to cope with the new environment (after the loss of a food source and the appearance of a new predator). So what you see as deleterious mutations, and what I see as genetic variety within the population, can actually serve the species well and help it survive the harsh conditions.
In short:
Designed things deteriorate over time, and are fragile (can fail under conditions different from those for which they were designed.
Evolved things do not deteriorate, but pick up useful variation. They are robust in that they are able to use that variation to adapt to conditions different from those in which they originally evolved.
Those are two vastly different ways of looking at the same kind of evidence. I'll suggest that the evolution way of looking at the evidence better fits what we see.
AlphaOmegakid writes:Now, natural selection can remove these mutations from the population if the population can afford the cost of section. In organisms with large genomes, low fecundity, and long generation times (most large mammals), they cannot afford the cost of selction without severe inbreeding depression. So the population continues to exist under reduced selective pressures and the mutations just add up over time. The adding up problem is what "genetic entropy" is.
What you see as deleterious mutations that the population needs to remove if it can afford the cost, I instead see as beneficial genetic variation that the population needs to hoard to the extent that it can afford to hoard it. What you see as "genetic entropy" and as a problem, I see as genetic variation and as an asset.
Jesus was a liberal hippie
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