A Dialogue with Nathaniel Jeanson?

Well that’s a bit of a gap. :slight_smile: I am interested in Nathaniel’s reconciliation of a 100x different estimate with mainstream population genetics.

2 Likes

Well that’s why he hasn’t responded to us yet, and likely won’t. He has far to much to lose here, and not much gain in sight. I am sure he will ask us again to “read his book”, even though he should know by now that’s exposing that refrain as empty rhetoric.

5 Likes

4 posts were split to a new topic: Toni Torppa and Genetics

The Facebook video is now on YouTube:

5 Likes

I have now responded to Jeanson’s concerns. Enjoy.

2 Likes

Ok, so Jeanson is complaining that evolution advocates are still arguing against the creationist views of the 1860s, yet not only fails to mention the ubiquitous references to “Darwin”, “Darwinism” and “Origin” across creationism, but then cites Linnaeus’s classification of canids.

He proceeds to treat us to a round of creationist ark-fitting bingo - ignoring or lying about their number, space requirements, food and water requirements, extinct species, packing the animals in like cuboid sardines, and inflating the ark’s dimensions.

He treats us to a punnet square for stripes in equids, completely ignoring the fact that if there were only two equids on the ark, a zebra-like one and a wild-ass-like one that interbred, then we’d have herds of mixed coat types, not the existing separation of zebras and wild asses etc that exists today and has existed for as long as we have records, as well as probably the occasional brown zebra or striped ass.

It’s laughable.

3 Likes

I want someone to work this one out for me. Is this true? Is there an article on this somewhere @Joel_Duff?

This raises all sorts of questions. How does this supposed existing variation get sorted so neatly into separate species? How does such great genetic divergence arise from sorting and recombination? How does reproductive isolation arise within these original populations? How, incidentally, do changes in chromosome number arise through recombination?

And if all this is just sorting of ancestral heterozygosity, how can that result in a well-supported phylogenetic tree with changes happening on particular branches? Shouldn’t we see a star tree at best?

4 Likes

I was struck by the way he went through slide after slide of (mostly) mammalian species to illustrate the vast breadth of variation, then said “but remember fish aren’t on the Ark” well duh no one said they were.

But if they weren’t, how would they survive the Fludde? If it’s salt water, all the freshwater fish die; if it’s fresh water, all the saltwater fish die. Not to mention the immense sediment load in the water, which should prevent any fish from eating or breathing. Let’s not forget all the fish killed in the Fludde, as shown by fossils.

2 Likes

More ad hoc hypotheses like “maybe fish back then could survive in both salt and fresh water and they’ve just lost the ability since then”

1 Like

I do wonder if all the ancestral fish kinds were themselves massively heterozygous and diversified into the fish species we see today. I wonder if there would be any discernible difference in the genetics of the kinds not on the ark and those on the ark. For that matter, would there be any difference between the clean kinds (7 pairs) and the unclean ones (one pair)? Finally, I wonder if even the creationists take this nonsense seriously.

Taking this nonsense seriously is what got me out, so…

1 Like

Yeah it’s funny how that works. It’s all designed only to survive cursory inspection, but please don’t look too close.

9 posts were split to a new topic: What does biblical literalism mean?

Don’t forget you only need two fish to survive from each kind/family to give rise to all the diversity we see today.

Those were among my thoughts too (well, except the last, I’d forgotten that chromosome numbers differed among horses).

If all equids started with two animals, how did their coat genes get so thoroughly sorted so quickly that there are no recessive non-stripes genes in zebras and no recessive stripe genes in donkeys?

1 Like

Also, the term “kind” can be defined as widely or narrowly as fits one’s present purpose. Thus, even all bacteria are a single “kind.” (That has produced the popular slogan, “But that’s not evolution. It’s still a bacteria.”)

1 Like

Naked credentialism. When I was a grad student it was explained to me that the student is the world’s foremost expert on whatever his thesis subject is and probably knows the literature better than any professor. Anyway, I’m a phylogeneticist and I found nothing wrong in his post.

6 Likes

And that appears to apply not just in the sciences but the humanities as well. Of course, considering what a doctoral student has to do produce a dissertation, we should expect this. I would say that the Internet and electronic publications have made this maxim even more obvious. The relevant literature usually becomes known to the grad student much more rapidly than in my day.

1 Like