Comment on WASC Reviews LSU’s Accreditation by Professor Kent.
Sean Pitman: No. Slowly reproducing creatures have been degenerating all along since Eden.
Where do the scriptures require this view? Where has the SDA Church stated this is its official view? Are you suggesting that SDA biologists who fail to teach this view are unqualified to teach within the system?
Sean Pitman: The argument in play is if the effects of detrimental mutations can be overcome fast enough to avoid a gradual but steady decline in the gene pools of slowly reproducing creatures?
Sean, you stated, and I quote, “What is not published in literature is any viable mechanism whereby the overwhelming load of detrimental mutations might be removed from the gene pools of slowly reproducing creatures (like all mammals for example) nearly as fast as they are entering it. While there have been some feeble attempts in literature to try to explain how this might happen, these attempts all have fundamental flaws that do not substantively address the problem…”
Pauluc offered an example in nematodes for which natural selection overcame the detrimental mutations, but you insisted it could not happen in slowly-reproducing species. The abstracts I posted very clearly demonstrated how critical traits in slowly-reproducing species can indeed be selected for at rates that exceed the detrimental mutations. To dismiss the abstracts outright is to move the goalposts.
If your thesis is correct, Sean, it becomes very difficult to explain how slowly reproducing creatures–including many but not all fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals–have successfully colonized islands and remote regions of the planet subsequent to the flood. How do YOU suggest they became adapted to live in their unique environments if, as you say, they are all succombing to degeneration faster than natural selection can ensure the origin and refinement of new traits that ensure survival in new and continually changing environments? Can you elucidate your personal model to explain how thousands of new species managed to evolve during the past 4,000+ years after departing the ark?(We’ll call this “microevolution” for the sake of those disturbed by any such notion.) It seems to me your model would suggest a gradual or even rapid declines in the genetic diversity of populations and in global species diversity.
Professor Kent Also Commented
WASC Reviews LSU’s Accreditation
WHAT DOES SEAN PITMAN TRULY BELIEVE?
Science has irrefutably shown the Bible’s claim that a human body decomposing several days cannot come back to life. Thus, science and scripture depart on this claim. There is no middle ground.
Who do YOU believe: God, because you take Him at his word, or the empirical evidence that drives human reason and science?
WASC Reviews LSU’s Accreditation
Sean Pitman: Epistatic interactions (the effects of a given mutation modified by other mutations) are irrelevant to the problem at hand – as are your arguments as to the nature of the environment and the presence of other mutations.
If you don’t think the environment or epistatic interactions are relevant, then you’ll have much difficulty deciding whether a given mutation is deleterious, neutral, or beneficial, and you won’t have a clue how strong selection is on it. I suggest you read the April 2010 issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Don’t bother if your mind is already made up.
Sean Pitman: “This problem is explained rather neatly by the Biblical model of origins.”
Where does the Bible tell us that animals accumulate deleterious mutations faster than selection, recombination, and other mechanisms can overcome them? Where does the Bible tell us that lineages have a finite lifetime limited by their genes?
Sean Pitman: The data is clear and the implications are straightforward. The standard arguments of evolutionists fall flat in that they don’t actually solve this particular problem by a long shot – a problem that is fundamental to the entire modern theory of evolution.
There’s no point in arguing further with established fact, so I’ll desist. Congratulations, Sean, on elucidating and solving yet one more riddle that 99.5% of the world’s scientists have completely overlooked or denied. I’m gaining a clearer understanding why you are unwilling to take God at his word and prefer to rely, instead, on your own extraordinary reason and intellect. Clearly, God needs you to save the world from disbelief.
WASC Reviews LSU’s Accreditation
Sean Pitman’s doctrine of salvation merits a double-take:
“Salvation is about doing to others as you would have done to you.”
“Salvation is based on love – love toward our fellow man. The law of love is the Royal Law mentioned in James (James 2:8 NIV). Because the Royal Law is written on the hearts of all, all can be saved by living according to this law.”
Seventh-day Adventists do not teach or believe in salvation by works. Salvation is a free gift and is NOT procured by our actions toward fellow man (which is fortunate for Sean’s sake). So why does Sean undermine SDA fundamental belief #10? I am astonished by his heterodox theology. Wait a minute…I hear his supporters clamoring to claim he is (as always) correct.
Recent Comments by Professor Kent
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
Nic Samojluk: No wonder most creationist writers do not even try to submit their papers to such organizations.
Who wants to waste his/her time trying to enter through a door that is closed to him/her a priori?
You have no idea what you’re writing about, Nic. As it turns out, there are in fact many of us Adventists who “waste” our time publishing articles through doors that open to us a priori. Even Leonard Brand at Loma Linda, a widely recognized creationist, has published in the top geology journals. I mean the top journals in the discipline.
The myth that creationists cannot publish in mainstream science is perpetuated by people who simply do not understand the culture of science–and will remain clueless that they do not understand it even when confronted with their misunderstandings. Such is human nature.
Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
Pauluc,
Your questions about conservation genetics are very insightful. I don’t understand how all these life forms were able to greatly increase in genetic diversity while simultaneously winding down and losing genetic information to mutations. Sean seems to insist that both processes happen simultaneously. I had the impression he has insisted all along that the former cannot overcome the latter. But I think you must be right: God had to intervene to alter the course of nature. However, we can probably test this empirically because there must be a signature of evidence available in the DNA. I’ll bet Sean can find the evidence for this.
I’m also glad the predators (just 2 of most such species) in the ark had enough clean animals (14 of each such species) to eat during the deluge and in the months and years after they emerged from the ark that they didn’t wipe out the vast majority of animal species through predation. Maybe they all consumed manna while in the ark and during the first few months or years afterward. Perhaps Sean can find in the literature a gene for a single digestive enzyme that is common to all predatory animals, from the lowest invertebrate to the highest vertebrate. Now that would be amazing.
Wait a minute–I remember once being told that SDA biologists like Art Chadwick believe that some animals survived on floating vegetation outside the ark. Now that would solve some of these very real problems! I wonder whether readers here would allow for this possibility. Multiple arks without walls, roof, and human caretakers.
Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
Ellen White said, “In the days of Noah, men…many times larger than now exist, were buried, and thus preserved as an evidence to later generations that the antediluvians [presumably referring to humans] perished by a flood. God designed that the discovery of these things should establish faith in inspired history…”
Sean Pitman said, “All human fossils discovered so far are Tertiary or post-Flood fossils. There are no known antediluvian human fossils.”
Ellen White tells us that humans and dinosaurs (presumably referred to in the statement, “a class of very large animals which perished at the flood… mammoth animals”) lived together before the flood. Evolutionary biologists tell us that dinosaurs and humans never lived together. You’re telling us, Sean, that the fossil record supports the conclusion of evolutionists rather than that of Ellen White and the SDA Church. Many of the “very large animals which perished at the flood” are found only in fossil deposits prior to or attributed to the flood, whereas hunans occur in fossil deposits only after the flood (when their numbers were most scarce).
Should the SDA biologists, who are supposed to teach “creation science,” be fired if they teach what you have just conceded?
La Sierra Univeristy Fires Dr. Lee Greer; Signs anti-Creation Bond
For those aghast about the LSU situation and wondering what other SDA institutions have taken out bonds, hold on to your britches. You’ll be stunned when you learn (soon) how many of our other schools, and which ones in particular, have taken out these bonds. You will be amazed to learn just how many other administrators have deliberately secularized their institutions besides Randal Wisbey, presumably because they too hate the SDA Church (as David Read has put it so tactfully).
Be sure to protest equally loudly.
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Sean Pitman:
So clearly you believe that science can explain supernatural events. Congratulations on that.
