It is really not clear to me from that wiki article you posted that Sanford's view has been refuted. I took a look at Kimura's paper, and it seems the wiki aut

It is really not clear to me from that wiki article you posted that Sanford's view has been refuted. I took a look at Kimura's paper, and it seems the wiki author either didn't read it or didn't understand Kimura's argument. "Sanford also misuses Kimura's mutation distribution; Kimura excludes beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one." This makes it sound as if Sanford is excluding beneficial mutations because otherwise they would disprove his 'genetic entropy' thesis since they are very beneficial and outweigh the amassing of negative mutations. However, from what I can understand of the original paper, Kimura actually excludes beneficial mutations from his model because they do not match the empirical data, and thus must be much less beneficial or common than his model requires. Here's the cite from his paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC383841/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC383841/ From the abstract: "The situation becomes quite different if slightly advantageous mutations occur at a constant rate independent of environmental conditions. In this case, the evolutionary rate can become enormously higher in a species with a very large population size than in a species with a small population size, contrary to the observed pattern of evolution at the molecular level." From the beginning: "Note that in this formulation, we disregard beneficial mutants, and restrict our consideration only to deleterious and neutral mutations. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification, but as I shall show later, a model assuming that beneficial mutations also arise at a constant rate independent of environmental changes leads to unrealistic results." And near the end of the article: "To make our analysis complete, let us investigate how the evolutionary rate is influenced by assuming that a certain fraction of mutations are advantageous....This means the rate of evolution can become enormously high in very large populations, kg being directly proportional to Ne, contrary to actual observations." Kimura is saying that beneficial mutations do not follow his model, because they must be much less common than his model requires, so he excludes beneficial mutations. This sounds to me consistent with what Sanford is saying, unless I am misunderstanding something. If you come to a different understanding of Kimura, please let me know. At any rate, it is not intellectually dishonest for scholars to disagree. There is no requirement that scholars must agree with the status quo. In fact, that's anti thetical to the entire scientific project. Intellectual dishonesty consists of things like knowingly making logically fallacious arguments and falsifying evidence, none of which it is obvious, at least to me from the wiki article you posted, that Sanford is doing. So it is unclear to me why he should not be regarded as an intellectually honest YEC, and have his views respected as such. I am happy to be convinced otherwise.