User:PeterL/Mendel's Accountant

Mendel's Accountant is a tool for the creation of exponential decay curves, promoted as a population genetics simulator by its Young Earth Creationist developers John C. Sanford, John R. Baumgardner, Wesley Brewer, Paul T. Gibson and Walter ReMine. It is commonly used by creationists as their simulator of choice&mdash;often as part of a demonstration that the genome deteriorates over time, thus showing that life could not exist now if it came into being more than a few thousand years ago.

The name comes from the name of the 19th century founder of the field of genetics, and the current version (2.0) is named "gregor."

Program details
Mendel's Accountant is available at sourceforge for Windows, Linux and Mac; it has a web based interface; is written in C, Fortran, Javascript and/or Perl (depending on the version); and it is released under the GPLv3.

Pro
The authors of the program introduce it like so: Mendel’s Accountant...is a state-of-the-art forward-time population genetics model...It treats the process of natural selection in a precise way....Mendel is...a versatile and capable research tool that can be applied to problems in human genetics, plant and animal breeding, and management of endangered species...When biologically realistic parameters are selected, Mendel shows consistently that genetic deterioration is an inevitable outcome of the processes of mutation and natural selection. The primary reason is that most deleterious mutations are too subtle to be detected and eliminated by natural selection and therefore accumulate steadily generation after generation and inexorably degrade ﬁtness.

And:

Evolutionary genetic theory has a series of apparent “fatal flaws” which are well known to population geneticists...These fatal flaws have been recognized by leaders in the field for many decades—based upon logic and mathematical formulations. However population geneticists have generally been very reluctant to openly acknowledge these theoretical problems...Numerical simulation provides a definitive tool for empirically testing the reality of these fatal flaws and can resolve the confusion. The program Mendel’s Accountant (Mendel) was developed for this purpose...When any reasonable set of biological parameters are used, Mendel provides overwhelming empirical evidence that all of the “fatal flaws” inherent in evolutionary genetic theory are real. This leaves evolutionary genetic theory effectively falsified—with a degree of certainty which should satisfy any reasonable and open-minded person.

Anti
Various problems have been raised by critics. The default settings keep a constant population of 1000, which is a little low in the light of problems of genetic fixation in small populations; they begin with an entirely unmutated population; they include no genetic linkage; they classify genes as either dominant or recessive, giving no other choices; it does not incorporate sexual selection; and does not allow for the duplication of genetic material. These and other problems mean that the the program is vastly simplified when compared to the real world.