Themelios Review: Mice-Rats and Human-Chimps

I am curious what the Peaceful Science community things. This article is anonymous. How would you respond? I’m thinking of responding to @AGauger soon too (Ann Gauger's Response to My Themelios Review).

I want to point out one thing to commend and adjust.

One, by Joshua Swamidass, is negative. Ann Gauger has already written excellent responses to Dr. Swamidass, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, including on the relevant science.

This was not a negative review. It was honest, and had many good things to say about the book.

It’s worth engaging him, since Swamidass is the relatively rare critic of ID who works at tackling arguments for design in a substantive fashion.

Thank you for acknowledging engaging ID substantively. I’m still not convinced, but I do aim to treat ID fairly.

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Ignore them. DI is not your friend.

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And another one, this time focused on the molecular clock evidence for common descent. It is hard to know where to start with this one. A lot of confusion about my case:

https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/response-to-swamidass-rats-mice-and-discrepant-molecular-clocks/

It is really remarkable that they consider hypothesis testing a type of circular reasoning.

Articles signed “Evolution news” tend to be from Denyse O’Leary.

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I thought it was anyone in their network that does not want to be personally identified. I’m tempted to just ignore anonymous posts…

Could be someone else. Statistically…

The two things that stood out:

  1. They forget to mention that it is the pattern of similarities that points to common ancestry (i.e. phylogenetics).

  2. They get the math wrong for beneficial adaptations that require more than one mutation (i.e. epistasis). If there were only a single possible combination of two mutations in the entire genome that would give rise to a beneficial adaptation then their math would be correct. However, there is every reason to believe that there are many, many possible combinations that could be beneficial at any one time. According to their logic it should take hundreds of millions of lottery drawings before someone wins.

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I think we can give a more complete response to this. What do the other scientists think?