Now that was an insulting little post. Who would “us” be? Do you even understand my description of his main problem? It’s really very simple and easily stated, again: his data are not properly aligned. If they were, there would be zero character variation among “species”. The CI, given a correct alignment, would be 0/0, undefined. All his supposed high CI is an artifact of bad alignment. Do you understand that argument?
Could somebody transfer all this to the relevant thread? (Holloway: Fallacy of the phylogenetic signal: nucleotide level)
Hmm. Now, I’m the furthest thing from an expert in this field so much of that discussion goes over my head. But what is apparent is that @EricMH, who admits to being a “newbie”, keeps trying to generate data, and the experts in that discussion keep in effect saying “What the hell are you doing? That is not how this is done at all. Have you the faintest clue what you are doing?” Then Eric posts some more of his results, and the response is the same.
From this, it appears to me that Eric is in way over his head but refuses to admit this.
However, @r_speir seems to see it completely differently. I wonder if he can explain what he sees, and justify his version of events.
Absolute proof that lab sequencing, computer simulations, etc are not real science and that the public is still waiting on you and yours to bring forth what you say you possess. Give us some real proof of evolution or retract your presumptuous claims.
Uhm seriously, where did you get this weird idea that anyting Holloway claims to have done has anything to do with sequencing of chims or humans or even primates?
What wrong with sequencing now? I’ve been told it’s observational science. When you sequence something, you’re using an instrument to help you observe what the sequence of chemical bases that make up an organism’s genome is.
“Consequently, it is incorrect to say the phylogenetic signal is strong evidence for evolution. In particular, this claim is provably false (as I have proven here):”
Assertions are easy. The hard part is supporting those assertions with evidence which Eric hasn’t done. Eric isn’t the one who gets to decide if his arguments have been refuted, for obvious reasons.
Eric makes claims that don’t even connect to what @r_speir seems to understand them to be.
I suspect Eric(corrected to) r_speir might be thinking of the degree of similarity calculated from comparing humans to chimp genomes. But that just makes it doubly mysterious why he then, when having it pointed out this isn’t about human vs chimp sequences, elected to say it’s about “primates” instead.
He’s basically just saying stuff because he doesn’t even halfway understand what is being talked about. He maybe has some foggy idea what the subject relates to (something with using DNA sequences to do… something that @r_speir has no actual idea what is).
He’s probably got two different subjects mixed up. One is using phylogenetic signal to infer a shared genealogical relationship, the other is using genetic similarity measures combined wïth mutation rates to try to calculate how far back that common ancestor lies. @r_speir has no idea how either of those are done, but someone on his “team” appears to have said something that looks like an argument against these methods, so @r_speir is now taking those assertions as if they’ve been lifted straight from the Bible itself, in a verse where Jesus is depicted as speaking in the 1st person. Eric Holloways said it, that settles it. QED.
That’s what I suspect as well. It really comes down to how you express similarity with 35 million substitutions, 5 million indels, and some genome rearrangements. It seems to be more of a semantic argument than anything else.
It is also a rather strange creationist argument. It’s not as if the genetic evidence for evolution goes away if we express the similarity as ~96% instead of ~98%. It’s still the same number of substitutions and indels we already knew about and as reported in the chimp genome paper. It is still a fact that chimps share more DNA with humans than they do with any other ape species. It is still a fact that the human and chimp genomes are very similar, and the differences are well within the ranges that could be produced in 5-7 million years of evolution.
And you can continue to live in your own little world and the public will continue to stand back and laugh. You have not even started to do the work required to show the enormous gulf of difference between the human and chimp species. It is more than apparent that you have stopped your analysis far too soon.
