Can the standard "Young Earth Creationist" model be falsified by genetics alone?

"I need calculations."I will answer more fully when I am not posting from a phone, but aren't the repercussions of rapid decay something you should have considered when you thought this stuff up? After all we all have radioactive elements in our bodies. Is it really scientific to only consider the effects you like?I'be provided enough info to find the RATE study if you are really interested, but I will provide a link later. Hopefully the info will allow starting a discussion at a more advanced level.Meanwhile you have a link already to the K40 self irradiation problem.ABE:The link previously provided was to previous discussion of the RATE study. I repeat that link Heat and radiation destroy claims of accelerated nuclear decay .Here is a link to the actual study:http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/research/rate-all.pdfAnd AIG's Summary: Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth | Answers in Genesis .

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The jury is still out and, until we complete our research phase, this thesis remains tentative. The presence of supernatural process during creation is essential to our approach, however.

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For completeness here are some rebuttals from "Old Earth Ministries" and other places. I understand that this information may not be helpful in preparing your defense of rapid decay, but please vet your ideas before making us do that for you. [1]RATE Project IndexRATE and Age of the Earth - Radiometric Dating[1] Hopeless plea. Creation scientists never do vet their own stuff as doing so interferes with a preferred "see what sticks" posting methodology.Edited by NoNukes, : Links as promised.

How can you ask for a link to the RATE Study? This was a study done by the YEC/ID flagship organization, The Discovery Institute, and is widely known and available in just a simple search without even trying hard. Are you really that incapable?Don't answer that. It was rhetorical. We already know the answer.Let me save you the intense labor of having to actually click on a link. I'll give you the RATE Groups conclusions.This is taken verbatim from the RATE Groups final report:

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After careful study and due contemplation we must conclude that the scenario of accelerated radioactive decay is total bullshit. We tested every scenario we could pull out of our butts to find a solution but there just isn't one.

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The amount of heat produced in any attempt to cram 500 million years worth of natural radioactive decay into the one year of The Flud under even the most idiotic scenario we could derive is just too fucking great. The heat would be so tremendous over the entire globe that not only would all the oceans boil away along with every other drop of water but all the rocks, all of them, would melt and the whole surface of Earth would be a flat cauldron of lava bubbling away like a pot of slow-boiling soup. No mountains, no hills, no rocks, no 2-of-every-kind or seven-of-every-clean-kind depending upon which genesis myth you care to believe, no Noah, no Noah's family, no Noah's ark, no nothing!

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However, we are religious idiots and believe in the literal infallible creation myths of the one and only version of the true Bible that we use and must therefor conclude that God had to have magiced all the heat away somehow because without that there is no fucking way accelerated radioactive decay could have happened.

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Edited by AZPaul3, : spacing

Your RATE link is to RATE - 1. RATE - I I is at Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Volume II | The Institute for Creation Research.The ASA site is probably the best debunking site. There's lots of others.

Bluegenes, thanks for the civil discussion. I am not sure why it took you so long to point out the reference sequence, but other than that particular delay you have communicated well which is more than I can say for nearly everyone else in this forum.There are so many variables that do affect your stance, but I have probed and probed for weaknesses in your argument that would have a major effect and generally feel that you have answered well.The chimp does play a significant role in the study, but even so it has the role of reducing the mutations to a more reliable core and so even though there are some flaws in using the chimp I do see your 98.3 % point and your earlier point about the same logic being applicable under common design or common ancestry.So to conclude I generally agree with you on your points regarding my questions 1 and 2, despite the uncertainty regarding some variables. So your opening post makes sense regarding current rates, so we are now disputing the application of those rates to times past. I'm not getting you here, could you explain this again please. I don't see how we can work out mutation rates from that study itself, we need outside mutation rates to determine the timespans involved. I did post a link that showed that lifestyle effects mutation, and so my claim is not unsupported. I added an additional claim that age of parenthood affects mutations, which is widely known, here is a link to support that claim:Just a moment...
Abstract
"The number of de novo mutations in the germline can be expected to increase with age in males, therefore females might decrease mutation load in their progeny by avoiding mating with older males. Here, I propose that female polyandry can be more effective in decreasing the risk of genetic disorders in progeny than pre-copulatory mate choice, particularly if sperm competitiveness declines more steeply with age than other traits affecting chances of males to mate. If faster ageing of spermatogenic tissue causes older males to transfer inadequate numbers of functional sperm, polyandry would also benefit females directly."Now the bible claims that the males were vastly older than today when having their first offspring during the early post-flood years, so the accumulation of germline mutations during a difficult lifestyle and also from older males per generation would have been much higher during the first few generations. Shem was 100 years old, most others had their FIRST child in their thirties, later Terah had his children in his seventies, Abraham at a late age as well.Paternal age effect - Wikipedia
The population geneticist James F. Crow said that the fact that DNA in sperm degrades as men age and can then be passed along to children in permanently degraded and irreparable form, which they likely pass on as well, means that the "greatest mutational health hazard to the human genome is fertile older males"Eight times as many mutations in a 70 year old compared to a 20 year old, so there is some exponential effect occurring:
Fathers bequeath more mutations as they age | Nature
"A 36-year-old will pass on twice as many mutations to his child as a man of 20, and a 70-year-old eight times as many, Stefnsson’s team estimates." Bluegenes, we are looking at the existing germline mutations that exist in all of us. We still survive and breed even with these mutations, whether they came at the human population rapidly or slowly. The early population would have had less mutations than us, whether gained rapidly or slowly. We survive, of course they would have survived having even less than us. High radioactivity causes mutations. If rocks decayed faster in the past, the resulting radiation would have caused more mutations.I believe current rates of radioactivity are slowed down by the muon effect. Muons when colliding with earth generate many neutrons, which in turn prevent the decay of heavy elements. Under past conditions the magnetic field was stronger, preventing many muons from striking earth, the background neutrons were less and hence parent isotopes decayed at a faster rate, producing radiation that would have affected the mutation rate.Edited by mindspawn, : No reason given.

From now on I will restrict my replies to posts that contain no personal attacks, even if somewhere in the post there are some facts or good questions.

Nonukes, that's a 444 page document. Could you kindly quote the portion that you feel is relevant.
http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/research/rate-all.pdf None on those rebuttals deal with my muon hypothesis. Muons are currently slowing down decay by producing many neutrons on impact with the earth. (neutrons are known to slow down the decay of heavy isotopes). During past periods of strong magnetic fields, the muon effect would have been less, the decay more rapid.

No, they are not, at least not in any physically relevant situation.And of course you haven't thought things through, you're just spewing any nonsense that comes into you head. If the decay of heavy isotopes has been slowed then the dates we are measuring are too young. That is, the samples would be significantly older that our measurements say they are.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Quotes and references and discussion are in Heat and radiation destroy claims of accelerated nuclear decay. Of course you've ignored that twice already.

That's a whole thread. Could you kindly summarise your point and refer me to a specific link. I haven't got the time to look through all those posts, and at this stage I'm not even sure what I would be looking for.

I suggest you think that through. Rates are slow now. This means that they overestimate time periods when comparing ratios of parent to daughter isotopes. Without the slowdown, rocks would rapidly decay into daughter isotopes which I believe is what happened from about 4400 years ago until about 1700 years ago. (approximately).

That's OK. No replies necessary. The points are made and stand.

Obviously you didn't even bother to look. The summary is in the first message of the thread. Specific links are in that message.

Ah, I see. It's an incredibly stupid idea, but I see. So you think that what we see as 253 million years of decay is really 2,700 years of decay, or a factor of about 100,000 speed up.Let's look at self-irradiation. From the link you're trying so hard to avoid, human self-irradiation today due to decay of ⁴⁰K is about 100 or more μSv/year. Speeding up decay by a linear factor of 100,000 over those 2,700 years results in self-irradiation of 10 Sv/year. A 30 year old person would have been exposed to about 300 Sv. From the links in the message you are so afraid of, 4-5 Sv kills 50% of exposed people in 30 days, and 6 Sv results in a 90% death rate and more at higher levels. So we're looking at a level of self-irradiation that is on the order of 30 times the dose that kills 90% of the people. And you think that humans never noticed that high death rate from radiation poisoning with the attendant sores and vomiting and whatnot? And you believe the human race (and all other life) could survive that?Making the decay speedup nonlinear would make it even worse.Oh, and your scenario requires that Hezikiah's tunnel (Wikipedia) was dug long before Hezikiah reigned. Got it.There's more. Heat. Consilience between different methods using isotopes that decay by different mechanisms. Consilience with non-radiometric methods.It just doesn't fly.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

No. I cannot be bothered to do that. And if that seems unfair, remember that you are asking me to do your homework. You are the one who has claimed that rapid decay rates are a viable explanation. It is well known that radioactive decay releases energy and that radiation is harmful to cell based life. So why aren't you on the hook for showing us the neutral consequences to life and the earth from just speeding up decay rates?Vet your own stuff before you post it. By now we should be debating your answer to where all the heat went and not arguing about whether the heat and radiation is a problem.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Yes. That's the inevitable course of the thread. What I was talking about is the relative differences on different lineages back to the point of a common Y ancestor. The fastest can have about 50% more mutations than the slowest, meaning that the variance (which relates to all the variant factors we've been discussing) is about 25% either side of the average. I then pointed out that if we generously assume the Chinese 13 generations to be as slow as the slowest lineage, the highest mutating lineages are going at about 4.5*10^-8, to which I could add that the average rate would be ~3.75*10^-8. Bear in mind that, assuming 180 generations back to a 4,500 year old common Y ancestor, you need the average mutation rate over time to be ~52*10^-8 to account for 300 mutations from the ancestor on any lineage on that 3.2Mb section. Nice to see a Christian posting research that points out the possible benefits of female promiscuity. Yes, I know all this, and agree, but it doesn't support your claim. See below. You started off arguing for an average generation gap of 18! He means that people like Shem, Terah and Abraham are health hazards. I agree. Yes, that's all fine. Now, work it out with this model. Lineage "X" goes back to the common ancestor with an average generation gap of 36 years, and therefore twice the mutations per generation than lineage "Z", which has a generation gap of 20 years, and therefore 1.8 times as many generations back to the ancestor. Take both back to the time of their common ancestor, and the result is a ratio of 10 mutations (for X) to each 9 (for Z). You see greater differences than that on the phylogenetic tree chart! We survive because the detrimentals get weeded out by death.Would you like to increase the early mutation level to the extent that every single individual conceived has a lethal mutation?What happens is that population groups get rid of detrimental mutations by producing an average of more than 1 offspring per. adult. A population can then maintain stability, or increase in size, because the extras cover for chance accidental deaths and deaths due to detrimental mutations. But if the mutation rate increases, the percentage of conceptions with detrimental mutations increases, which means the number of births/conceptions per. adult needs to increase as well in order to maintain/increase the population size. There's a limit to how high mutation rates can go. For the moment, I'll leave your geophysics alone, apart from agreeing that higher radioactivity can increase mutation rates, and I'll discuss the genetic angle. What I think we should look into is estimates on the current (low radiation) detrimental mutation rate. By this I mean the rate per. individual born. I've seen this estimated as high as 1.3 per individual, with most of these causing only very mild decreases in fitness, but a minority, perhaps 10%, causing significant decreases. If that's about right, imagine increasing the whole genome mutation rate by 10 times. That would mean 13 new detrimentals per. head, at least one causing a significant decrease in fitness on its own. I think that would mean extinction.What I'm wondering is whether humans could have a rate even double what it is now, and still have a growing population (without the help of modern medicine). I think we should look into it, so I'll check out the recent research.What you're doing now is correct from a YEC point of view. You won't find significant inaccuracies in the research papers I've been using (remember the two recent similar studies I linked to that reflect the results of the first). So, as I suggested to Faith earlier, the only thing for YECs to do is to argue for a very high mutation rate since Noah, especially early on. I knew we would end up here, in the realm of implausibly high mutation rates, deformity and DEATH.