More evidence for the reality of genetic entropyby Robert W. Carter
My colleague John Sanford and I have recently published a paper in a secular journal with
what we believe are profound implications.1
Our basic claim is that ‘genetic entropy’ works in the real world,
which brings questions about the role of natural selection and the long-term survival of species into the future.A new look at an old virus
The paper analyzed mutation accumulation in the human H1N1 influenza genome using over 95 years’ worth of genetic sequences (figure 1).
Figure 1. Mutation accumulation in human H1N1. The published Brevig Mission strain from 1918 was used as the baseline (bold line) for comparison with all available human-infecting H1N1 genomes. There are two distinct trend lines in the data. The 2009–2010 outbreak samples and additional samples from 2011–2012 are circled. These and the scattered points are all derived from swine H1N1 versions. The remaining points represent mutation accumulation in the ‘human’ version of H1N1: from 1918 to its initial extinction in 1957, a break of 19 years, its re-introduction in 1976 (of a strain from approximately 1955, after which the mutation count picks up where it left off), and a second disappearance in 2009.This type of data is a rarity in the world of genetics, since most sequence data are from recent organisms with long generation times. The influenza virus, however, has been isolated and sequenced from human tissue samples all the way back to 1918.
With a human-to-human transmission on average every three days or so, this makes over 11,000 disease generations and many times more than that number of viral generations.
The number of viral generations is possibly comparable to the number of generations since the supposed human-chimpanzee split.
Full article: http://creation.com/evidence-for-genetic-entropy