Your response is facile, fatuous, and disingenuous. You have the choice to either engage my answer or not, but I will not repeat myself.
Jeanson’s “predictions” are so logically vacuous that they need no in-depth scientific rebuttal (although @evograd did an excellent job of doing just that).
Toni, aren’t you completely avoiding the critique of Jeanson’s ability to interpret an unrooted tree, a criticism at the core of Jeanson’s credibility, and moving on in Gish Gallop tradition to something else you think you can get more traction on?
Well, now we’re waiting for you to show in your own words what I asked of Herman.
Jeanson’s predictions are not relevant. Even if it were true that some (even all) of the African groups had a high rate of evolution compared to other groups, that wouldn’t make the tree, under any rooting, fit his scenario. The problem is rooting, not branch lengths.
Who are “we”? Are you a king? Herman is right. The problem isn’t with evolutionary rates. The problem is that there is no way to root the tree so as to produce the three groups that Jeanson claims exist.
Toni is really showing why there is really little point in engaging with these people. They really don’t care at all about anyone’s expertise or the actual science.
The only way to make any claim about the relative ages of the nodes on any of Jeanson’s trees is to root them. But, regardless of what method you choose to employ to do so (outgroup, midpoint) they simply are in no way at all consistent with the story Jeanson wants to tell. This has been explained to you many times. The only story he is interested in telling is one where he can present the data in a way that is friendly to his particular religious beliefs.
I recognize this is very frustrating for you right now. I know the feeling. No matter what you say, no matter how many times you repeat the arguments and tropes and lines of reasoning you’ve been taught, none of it seems to work. You keep getting your objections shot down, hard, and you can’t find any obvious problems to nitpick. You keep jumping from one line of reasoning to another, hoping you’re going to hit on a vulnerability, and it’s just not working.
You’re disheartened and frustrated and you don’t understand why. I get it.
This is what it feels like when you begin to realize that YEC is nonsense. Keep pushing. You’ll get there.
Of course African populations are more diverse simply because they are much older! This explains the data beautifully and is in line with other lines of evidence such as paleoanthropology (other lines of evidence Jeanson ignore because it doesn’t fit his narrative).
It’s hard for me to imagine a more obvious way of Jeanson twisting the data to suit his agenda than what he has done with how he chooses to interpret these crude unrooted trees of his. It’s either done out of complete ignorance or deliberate deceit.
@Toni_Torppa if you want to get a little more of an appreciation of how genetic diversity confirms an African origin of humanity and mutations as the cause of genetic diversity rather than “created heterozygosity”, independent of the validity of Jeanson’s claims about unrooted trees and mutation rates, I’ll reccomend that you read the first point of evidence, titled “Ancestral Alleles” from another one of my blog posts:
On the contrary, this discussion with your academic “professors” has only shown that you evolutionists did not have the good arguments to support your case. I even amazed at the poor quality of the conversation. And I’m not even a scientist and yet I notice the weakness of your arguments.
No one has to be the world’s leading expert in population genetics or systematics to see through Jeanson’s BS. You just have to be competent. Like I’ve said repeatedly the knowledge that you can not assign relative ages to nodes on an unrooted tree because without a root the tree has no polarity is literally something you would learn in an undergraduate course dealing with systematics. Jeanson is no rocket scientist. Most of his mistakes are rather obvious and his approach could be at best called amateurish.
And yet you don’t seem to be able to articulate these weaknesses…
OK then. Please show exactly how you may come to the same conclusions as Jeanson does regarding human mtDNA variation by looking at an unrooted tree. Again you have just completely ignored that argument.
This response of yours is beneath everyone present, including you.
If the position you are advocating for demands of you that to continue, you have to start bluffing with a reaction like this in order to keep up the appearance that you have something to say back, then perhaps it’s not worth defending in the first place.
I don’t trust you on the subject and that’s why I don’t start reading your blog. If evolutionist professors are unable to justify their case in their own words, then the case is over. You’re probably a nice guy and I don’t mean this to you badly, but it’s wrong that in a dialogue like this, professors constantly go into hiding behind a student’s back. On top of all that, someone who is not an expert on the subject. This is not right.
Even as a student, Evograd may well have forgotten more that Jeanson has evidenced of understanding. This has been explained to you in this thread, but you choose to ignore it.
It is an obnoxious characteristic of YEC to blather on about credentials when those belong to one of their own, or to dismiss criticisms of those who deconstruct the YEC model. Then, when it comes to the overwhelming consensus of mainstream scientists and most distinguished and recognized researchers, all of a sudden credentials do not matter and science is not decided by majority. What a double standard, but such inconsistencies are what you have to resort to when the facts are not on your side.
I have justified my case in my own words.
Jeanson is not an expert on the subject, so why are you giving him more credit than you give @evograd, who is at least in a field closer to the subject?
Jeanson isn’t an expert on any of this either. His PhD had absolutely nothing to do with the stuff he’s pontificating about now. I however am a published expert of sorts in the area of systematics and population genetics. So is John. Evograd has had far more education on these topics than Jeanson has who seems to just be making things up as he goes along.
The reason you don’t trust evograd and don’t read his blog is because he’s not telling you what you want to hear and Jeanson is.
John and I are both experts on this material and we are telling you evograd is absolutely right and Jeanson is not.
Why should “evolutionist professors” spend their time writing a critique in their own words if they’ve read the work of a grad student who’s already covered it correctly in great detail?
Why should they say:
“That 15,000-word essay over there is correct, which I can judge because I’m an expert on this subject, but the person that wrote it hasn’t completed their PhD so I mustn’t reference it in any way. Here I go, writing the same thing in my own words…”?