I am sure there is someone with better chops than myself who could determine what the percentage of interbreeding is permissible and still have a better-than-even likelihood of extinction in those maternal lines.
And inbreeding would be almost completely mandatory during the first two generations or there would be virtually no chance of getting rid of interbred lineages.
His maths are awful and his rescuing devices are ad hoc.
Can you be more specific?
Cherry-picking data, mostly.
Hereâs a good review:
Also, all of his âPredicted mtDNA Differencesâ charts are bunk. He doesnât account for genome length or natural selection, and he uses cherry-picked mutation rates to inflate the supposed âpredictionsâ of the mainstream model.
Why should anyone care about this paper? He merely tests and refutes a particular YEC hypothesis, which he then takes as evidence favoring his own YEC hypothesis. At no point is an evolutionary hypothesis even considered, much less tested. I note other problems, in passing.
He goes on to say this is impossible because the mutation rates are not known. But phylogenetic analysis, which is what heâs talking about even if he doesnât know it, doesnât depend on knowing mutation rates. And in fact there are several publications in which ancestral proteins have been reconstructed, actually produced, and tested for activity.
Hereâs what heâs testing:
Well, this ânull hypothesisâ should be easily falsified, since itâs just silly. And the rest of the paper proceeds to falsify it. So what? Itâs an absurd creationist hypothesis. What it shows, if anything, is that a hypothesis he doesnât subscribe to isnât correct. It has nothing to do with testing his preferred hypothesis against evolutionary hypotheses. (Note that heâs using protein sequences, not DNA sequences. Thereâs a difference.)
He seems to have no concept of mutational biases, such as the high transition/transversion bias in most mitochondrial genomes, or substitution bias, such as the tendency for hydrophobic amino acids to be replaced by other hydrophobic amino acids. His models assume that all mutations and substutions are equally likely.
His models also assume that he can identify âkindsâ and that no kinds are related. If the kinds are related, his âdirectionalâ changes are merely basal branches in the tree. Nothing to see here, folks.
This section already at the beginning stood out to me:
Second, genetic ancestry must ultimately trace back to the created âkindsâ of the Creation week. Genesis 1 repeatedly uses the phrase âafter their kindâ to describe the biological results of Godâs spoken activity, and in this context, this phrase suggests a grouping or type. These types were not predated by any other organisms; universal common ancestry is not the biblical model for molecular origins. Thus, modern molecular differences must not be traced back beyond the Creation week to âpre-creationâ sequences".
Yep. But they can be, and scientists have done so. Ancestral sequences well beyond whatever the levels of âbiblical kindsâ he suggests later in the paper can be reconstructed and shown to function in the laboratory. He basically just ignores the nested hierarchy completely.
Science: it works, friends.
There really can be no getting past this.
âAny molecular model proposed in answer to these challenges must conform to the explicit teaching of Scripture. Several scriptural parameters restrict and inform potential explanationsâ
When someone says that they have decided what they are doing isnât science. No amount of parsing out the math will change that. This approach is completely divorced from what philosopher of science Lee McIntyre would call âthe scientific attitudeâ and gives anyone reading the blog posts Jeanson tries to pass off as âtechnical articlesâ ample reason to doubt him as a scientist.
Do you agree aside from testing against evolution that his methods are reasonable?
Do you have reason to believe mutational biases put in the model would materially change his results?
I havenât looked them closely enough to say because the point is moot. Since he chooses a silly null model, rejection of that model means nothing.
Yes. Third position transitions, for example, become saturated very quickly, and any estimate of the number of mutations separating two species that doesnât take that into account will be artificially low. Purifying selection is also ignored, and so is coalescence within species. GIGO.
Eliminating a common starting point across families of Mt DNA seems more than trivial. What his math does is show common direction to the mutations indicating common descent. If this is true and you can show this exists inside kinds but not outside kinds then this is also not trivial.
I donât understand yet how well these claims are supported. I agree with your comment on non random mutations being a better null.
But that isnât what he did. If his method were valid, which is not clear so far, all he did was show that families of arthropods and mammals were not separately created with identical sequences.
What do you mean by âkindâ?
Creationist lingo that approximately translates to family.
It is indeed a popular slogan among Young Earth Creationists but even they ignore it whenever convenient. Thus, âThatâs not evolution because it is still a bacterium.â arguments persist. That is, at any given moment absolutely any taxonomic classification can be applied to âkindâ when it evades a problem for a YEC claim. Thus, even an entire KINGDOM (as in Protista) or a DOMAIN (as in Prokaryota) sometimes gets classified as a âkindâ by various âcreation scienceâ advocates.
What I find interesting as an exegete is that âkindâ is considered as a âbaraminâ (based on the Hebrew words MIN [an kind-of-animal term] and BARA [verb for create]) even though examples of MIN usages in the Pentateuch are way below the family level in ways more like species.
The Hebrew noun MIN was never intended to be a taxonomic term. The YEC-invented âcreation scienceâ term baramin is an attempt at anachronistic imposition on the Biblical text. It may sound âBible-ishâ to some audiences but it is of relatively recent origin.
What does Jeanson mean by âkindâ and how does he know, a priori, that they actually are kinds?
Well, this is awkward:
Indeed. Perhaps the âapproximatelyâ in âapproximately translates to familyâ will save the day here.
You canât make this stuff up. From the paper we are talking aboutâŚ
âYet, the Drosophila ô°ô°ô°ô°ô°ô°species likely share a common ancestor since they belong to the same biological family (Wood 2006a), whereas humans and chimpanzees clearly have separate ancestries (Genesis 1:26â28).â
Just for the fun of it:
26 Then God said, âLet us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.â
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.28 God blessed them and said to them, âBe fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.â
Notice that nothing about the cited Genesis passage rules out that humans and chimpanzees could have had shared ancestries. The text simply states that (1) God made humans [without stating how], (2) that humans were made in Godâs image [a description which is still debated and variously defined by theologians], (3) that humans were created male and female, and (4) that humans would have dominion over other animals. Nothing here denies evolution or common descent.
I mean itâs just stupid to cite Bible verses in a paper you are trying to sell as science in the first place regardless of how you choose to interpret it.
What makes it worse is that some members of some kinds are more distantly related than humans and chimps are hypothesized to be.