@evograd and @Joel_Duff what are your thoughts on this? It’s the first detailed review by a creationist scientist of Traced I’ve seen.
By way of explanation, he applies the general rule that three Y chromosome mutations occur each generation, except for the first generation after Noah, to which he applies seven mutations. The figure of ‘3’ comes from his analysis of Y chromosome sequencing studies.2 It is not trivial to derive mutation rates from sequencing data, because the error rates inherent in the data are on the same order of magnitude of the in vivo mutation rate. Thus, all papers published on the subject to date have applied significant filtering steps to the data before the final estimates are reported. This is frustrating, to say the least, since an accurate estimation of the mutation rate is one of the things that will separate the young-earth and the evolutionary models of human history.
Jeanson includes one large Y-chromosome tree (figure 1), but does not explain why the tree starts at his chosen point and not where the evolutionists want it to be. There is an appendix that explains some of these major assumptions, but the explanations were overly technical and thus not very helpful. Presenting a creationist model for human history is important, and Jeanson needs to be complimented for being first to do this. Yet, a comparison to the evolutionary model would seem to be very desirable in a book of this nature.
Traced represents a significant milestone in creationist literature, in that it represents a major attempt to bridge the gap between biblical history and modern genetics in book form. The conclusions are perhaps more tentative than the claims of the book indicate, so readers should be cautious about taking what is said as the final word. Much more work needs to be done to bring ancient DNA into the fold, and better mathematical models of human population and genetic history still need to be developed.
Jeanson includes one large Y-chromosome tree (figure 1), but does not explain why the tree starts at his chosen point and not where the evolutionists want it to be. There is an appendix that explains some of these major assumptions, but the explanations were overly technical and thus not very helpful. Presenting a creationist model for human history is important, and Jeanson needs to be complimented for being first to do this. Yet, a comparison to the evolutionary model would seem to be very desirable in a book of this nature.
There are other ways to represent the same data. Figure 1 was derived from a diverse set of Y chromosomes reported by Bergström et al. (2020).3 Figure 2 is an unrooted tree that represents the Y chromosomes reported by the Simons Genome Diversity Project,4 which was reported in Carter, Lee, and Sanford (2018).5 Even though the data are displayed differently, the major branches are represented in both trees. This has implications for the question of potential ‘missing’ branches in modern data sets, as will be discussed below.
This approach has the advantage of not requiring a monotonic molecular clock across all lineages, all geography, and all time. However, and he admits this in the book, this necessitates that some lineages have a higher mutation rate today or at least had a higher mutation rate in the past. Since the most discordant lineages are in Africa, he appears to be saying that (some) Africans are more mutant than non-Africans.
A respected colleague who works in this field has strongly cautioned against saying anything like this in public. Yet, if something is true it needs to be said, so there remains an open question: are mutation rates variable among populations? Evolutionists partially avoid this problem by placing Y Chromosome Adam on an exclusively African branch. This reduces the extreme differences seen in Jeanson’s tree, but it does not completely avoid the problem, because some groups are still farther from the root than others, as has been documented elsewhere.4 Also, since non-Africans carry much more Neanderthal DNA than do Africans, and since Neanderthal DNA is highly divergent from that of modern humans, one can conclude that non-Africans carry many more mutations in their nuclear genome than do Africans. This partly blunts the non-politically correct aspects of the divergent African lineages.
If African lineages had a higher mutation rate than others (really a higher base substitution rate, but of course that’s the same given neutral evolution) wouldn’t that make them “more evolved”, and thus a good thing in popular reckoning?
Higher radiation loads due to people living on newly exposed rocks that contain uranium, a fluctuating magnetic field of the earth (which would produce pulses of increased cosmic ray activity at the surface), and changing radionuclide decay rates could all affect mutation accumulation rates.
LOL.
In reality, aDNA has finally opened up the murky world of early post-Flood history to us. We should be studying it intently while trying to turn the evolutionary conclusions on their ear.
(…)
aDNA should not be rejected by the creationist community. Instead, we need to incorporate it into our ideas of history, to whatever extent possible. We will, of course, reject the secular timeline, but the relative order of events is easily seen.
If African lineages had a higher mutation rate than others, wouldn’t that make them “more evolved”, and thus a good thing in popular reckoning?
I mean, creationists generally ascribe to genetic entropy, devolution, “no good mutations,” epigenetics, or… whatever their preferred flavor of the concept is — but it’s the opposite of the popular idea that “more evolved” equals better.
I guess now we get to see how committed creationists are to this twisted interpretation of genetics — will they dare apply it to human diversity?
Ah, I see the implication. By Jeanson’s model, Africans must be extra-devolved. Somebody should point that out to him and see if smoke comes out of his ears.
First, if Jeanson would just admit that the African populations are older he doesn’t have to invoke this mutation rate explanation. Of course doing so would mess up his story so he won’t do that.
Second, it appears neither Jeanson or Carter have ever heard of a relaxed molecular clock and in stating that mutation rates appear to them to be different on different branches they act as if they are discovering something new. They aren’t and the way they discuss these problems only highlights that they really do not know what they are talking about.
But they think they know what they are talking about or, at the very least, can convince their readers and followers that they do. And in Creation Science, that is all that counts.
Only if getting to the truth is your objective. If giving the appearance of winning your argument is the objective it can be an actual hindrance – in that it is generally easier to make a claim confidently if you don’t know enough to know that it’s false.
I didn’t comment that long ago, and I’m sure you’re busy, but i’m hoping you will eventually answer here or there. However I’m really curious whether I was reading the paper correctly so I’m copying and pasting here in case anyone else wants to set me straight meanwhile:
“Dr. Dan, I read through the y-chromosome Tristan da Cunha paper. I could easily be misunderstanding something, but it looks like they were only checking a set of markers (they list them, also figure 1) and there was no full sequencing going on. This paper is almost 20 years old, so that makes sense. (I’'m guessing you just found it.) But if it’s only checking a very small set of markers, of course they’re not going to find additional mutations! What say you?”
Also Dr.Dan you commented on the AIG video I linked above and referenced Canary Island and Vanuatu and mutation predictions, but IIRC the data you use is from an mtDNA paper?
So a thank you to @thoughtful for catching my error. I crossed some wires in outlining that linked video, and should have cited the mtDNA paper, not the Y-chromosome paper. Full correction here.
The mtDNA data from Tristan da Cunha is…not great for Jeanson. The maximum mutation rate based on the 1816 settlement is more than 5x slower than the rate he claimed in his 2015 “paper” in ARJ.
