Hi John
Here is Dan’s argument about 20 minutes in. While I think he makes some interesting points that should be considered, he appears to be confusing mutations that become fixed in a population with observed mutational variation in a population.
He’s not using all the data, then.
What you call “filtering,” I, a real scientist, call unethical cherry-picking.
I believe I have, Bill, and you have no coherent response.
As I understand it, he isn’t the one who’s filtering the Y chromosome data. He’s using the whole thing, including the parts that the authors filtered out because it wasn’t good data, just sequencing artifacts.
What are those points? And how could any of them be strong enough to make you consider the possibility that life is a recent phenomenon, in the face of all other evidence? I’m presuming you have at least a nodding acquaintance with some of that evidence, though I could easily be wrong about that.
You are correct, so it’s much worse than my characterization–but still cherry-picking.
Also, IIRC he’s ignoring the other studies that show higher mutation rates.
Do you mean “lower”? More importantly, he’s ignoring lots of genetic data, for example the data from other hominids, other primates, other mammals, etc. He’s ignoring all the non-genetic data, archeology, fossils, radiometric and other dating methods, geology, astronomy, and so on. It’s truly cargo cult science.
Yes, sorry.
And @colewd’s allegedly looked at it all for himself!
Jeanson’s hypothesis if true will not show the earth or all living organisms are young. It will simply imply that the current population of humans started much more recently then the current consensus.
So, in other words, you were shifting the goal posts. Let us recall the context in which you introduced Jeanson:
So now you disclaim any connection between Jeanson’s “science” and young life. Either you have changed your mind about Jeason’s work, or you were originally thinking about someone other than Jeanson, or you were stating a falsehood. Which?
My post was in error.
It should have stated that human life is young. If the methods work they can be used to test the approximate age of other organisms.
Grossly.
All the prior criticisms still apply. It ignores all the evidence that human life is ancient. Astronomy doesn’t contradict that particular claim, but everything else I mentioned does.
Why, even if the tree were young, it wouldn’t say anything about the age of humanity. Jeanson doesn’t understand coalescence, and I presume you don’t either.
The hypothesis has already been falsified by mounds of data.
Hypotheses do not make implications, simply or otherwise.
What methods? Why are you pretending that Jeanson is doing anything that produces data?
A problem Jeanson identified is that the evolutionary mutation rate does not scale with population growth except in the recent past. If you are interested I will cite his paper on this subject.
I have no idea what you think that word salad meant. It certainly isn’t anything Jeanson identified. It’s another symptom of your inability to read Jeanson and Jeanson’s inability to understand data.
Hi John
I might have not described it properly but here is the paper and maybe you can correct me.
We’ve discussed this paper (which can’t have been peer-reviewed by anyone competent in the field) here before. His methods are silly, his results nonsensical. Counting branches on a tree says nothing about population size. Jeanson has no clue about coalescence or about population genetic in general. I find it hard to believe you understood anything about that paper or even read more than its abstract and/or conclusions.
This is an interesting and relevant epistemological question. Here is another one in the same vein: how the C14 evidence be strong enough to make you consider the possibility that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval artifact, in the face of all other evidence?
What “other evidence”?
From the Wikipedia article:
First mentioned in 1354, the shroud was denounced in 1389 by the local bishop of Troyes as a fake.
…
In 1988, radiocarbon dating established that the shroud was from the Middle Ages, between the years 1260 and 1390.[5] All hypotheses put forward to challenge the radiocarbon dating have been scientifically refuted,[6] including the medieval repair hypothesis,[7][8][9] the bio-contamination hypothesis[10] and the carbon monoxide hypothesis.[11][12]
There are many. Here is the last one:
This one doesn’t appear to be particularly impressive.
… it best matched a piece of fabric known to have come from the siege of Masada, Israel, in 55-74 AD.
There’s no information as to what environmental processes might accelerate the degradation that Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) detects for, let alone information on how they ruled such processes out.
The underlying report, https://www.dsctm.cnr.it/it/archivio-m/highlights-m/507-2000-anni-di-storia-della-sindone-di-torino-visti-ai-raggi-x.html , does not appear to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
It is not even clear that WAXS has been validated as a dating method, as it was only three years ago that the Shroud of Turin report’s author proposed it as a method: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337358579_X-Ray_Dating_of_Ancient_Linen_Fabrics
We propose a new method for dating ancient linen threads by inspecting their structural degradation by means of wide-angle X-ray scattering.
All in all, not particularly solid ‘evidence’.