Okay, but remember: You asked for it…
20:24 Odd that so much vitriol is put on the fact that evolution makes a strong prediction. Making strong predictions is good. We have 23, chimps have 24, either the ancestral state was 23 with a fission or it was 24 with a fusion. Since all other apes (not just chimps) are 24, the parsimonious explanation is a fusion in the human lineage. This is a strong prediction.
20:50 And match the vitriol of a strong prediction with a dismissive treatment of the strong support for that prediction. Alignment of banding patterns is non-trivial, and finding two chimpanzee chromosomes with banding patterns that align with either side of one of the longest human chromosomes is exactly what you should find if there was a fusion. In fairness, this would also be compatible with a fission, but this is again not parsimonious given the other species.
21:10 And now the dishonesty starts! Remarkable given she contradicts her own presentation of the material thus far. She claims here that the ‘story’ was developed after finding the alignment of banding patterns, when the reverse is true! First we recognized that there was a difference in chromosome complement between humans and other apes, then we predicted a fusion in the human lineage (with a possible but unlikely fission) which would result in shared patterns between two chimp chromosomes and a single human chromosome, then we found exactly that thing we predicted. And again, banding alignment is non-trivial. You don’t find high quality alignments in banding patterns just anywhere.
21:50 Funny she mentions you can’t go into the fossils to find this, an admission that evidence from fossils is valid, because she ignores the fossil evidence. Don’t know how that works, but not relevant to the content.
22:07 Anyone who calls anything ‘definitive proof’ of anything is doing bad science. It is extremely strong supportive evidence of a fusion in the human lineage, which explains the difference in chromosome complement between humans and other great apes. Point me to the person calling it definitive proof of common ancestry and I’ll happily critique their word choice.
22:14 No, that’s not what a law is, but I’m glad she accepts that science doesn’t deal in definitive proof. I’m sure that means she complains about her ‘side’ demanding definitive proof for evolution then, right? Right?
22:40 After saying that some call it definitive proof, she shows two quotes from famous scientists. Neither calls it definitive proof. Funny, that.
23:45 She basically calls Ken Miller a liar. So that’s nice.
23:48 She makes a direct claim that she can show it wasn’t a fusion. Strong claim. Let’s see what she’s got!
24:00 “Because this isn’t about the evidence. Okay? The evidence is clear. It’s about a worldview, and not wanting to change that worldview even in spite of the obvious” That light you see is Georgia projecting hard enough you should see the AIG logo on the moon.
24:34 The relabeling is a product of annotation convenience. It makes a lot of programmatic work with sequences from apes easier, so people do it. Which, by the way, it wouldn’t if there wasn’t a fusion.
25:10 ‘Telomeres prevent fusions, so we should see a BUNCH of telomeres in a fusion!’ No, Georgia, we should barely see any telomeres in a fusion, because telomeres prevent fusions. How have you gotten such a simple thing so obviously wrong? Finding telomeres isn’t a requirement of validating a fusion site anyway. Honestly not even something you’d expect to find.
25:19 ‘Every chromosome has one centromere, so we should see an inactivated centromere along with the real one’ Which is exactly what we’ve found.
25:45 She complains that the telomere findings perfectly match the actual expectations (better than perfect, actually) rather than her ludicrous expectation that is obviously impossible. O…kay.
25:51 She mentions that there are ‘some’ telomeres there, and fails to mention that the number there is many orders of magnitude more than what you’d otherwise expect outside of a subtelomeric region.
26:03 Yes, we would admit that the telomere sequences we find are degenerate. Like what we find in subtelomeric regions. Because if there were functional telomeres there wouldn’t have been a fusion! I honestly have difficulty understanding how someone can not get this.
26:13 She says there shouldn’t be any telomere sequences that are there because it’s not two chromosomes that have fused. Ignoring the fact that there are telomeres there. A lot of them. Something that isn’t needed for it to be a fusion, but completely invalidates the idea it wasn’t. So yeah, obvious contradiction of her own point.
26:25 Again, she admits that we actually do find evidence of a centromere. Not an active one, obviously, we wouldn’t expect that. So again, we find exactly what we’d predict, but she dismisses it for… reasons.
26:40 Alphoid sequences aren’t unique to centromeres in the same way that telomeric sequences aren’t unique to telomeres. Hopefully the reason that’s an unimpressive argument is obvious. Can you guess how many non centromeric alphoid sequences are found in the human karyotype? Hint: It is a very small number.
26:42 She hand-waves to Tomkins. I’ve spent several hundred hours going through Tomkins’ work. It is all very bad. I’ll address any she does, or otherwise upon request.
26:49 ‘Gene spans the fusion site!’ A weird transcript of a pseudogene spans the fusion site. The variant in question is expressed at the level of noise, and has low similarity to the ‘highly’ transcribed variants (which are still barely transcribed). And that pseudogene is found multiple places throughout the genome, exclusively at telomeres. Yeah, push that thread, it’ll help.
And by the way, even if it was confirmed to be an actual gene with actual function, it still wouldn’t disprove a fusion. The entire line of evidence is completely irrelevant to Tomkins’ thesis at best, and absolutely contradictory to it at worst. Really, push that thread.
27:43 She claims that it doesn’t match up ‘sequence-wise’ with Ptr12&13. This is an outright lie. There is no way around it. But don’t just take my word for it:
Lines up pretty well if you ask me.
And that’s the requested segment of the video. Let me know if you have any questions.