Dr. Joshua Swamidass and TMR4A: Some Major Modeling Problems for Young Earth Creationism

[evograd (Blogging Graduate Student)]

I’m sorry you thought this comment of mine was a “mess”. What was unclear?

Testing Jeanson's Model: Y Chromosome Mutation Rates

To give a little bit of background here, I’d recommend you read the latter part of this blog post (subtitled “Y no Y chromosome”), in which I was rebutting chapter 8 of Jeanson’s book: In brief, chapter 7 of Jeanson’s book focused on mtDNA mutation rates, and then chapter 8 focused on nuclear genome mutation rates, but there was a conspicuous lack of any discussion on Y chromosome mutation rates specifically. I found this odd, because Jeanson himself said in the book that the Y chromosome could function as a clock in the same way as the mtDNA (passed down in a single sex). I suspect he didn’t talk about because as I show in the blog post, the published literature on Y chromosome diversity and mutation rates lines up perfectly with evolutionary timescales. Multiple pedigree studies and ancient DNA studies consistently showed that the Y chromosome mutation rate in the commonly sequenced, non-recombining regions is around 0.80×10^-9 mutations per nucleotide per year, or roughly 1 muta…

I explained that both pedigree and “evolutionary” studies of Y-chromosome mutation rates are consistent with long timescale and inconsistent with YECism. Those pedigree studies are among the ones Jeanson cites.

The issue is that Jeanson has decided, with no background in this field, that those pedigree studies missed a lot of mutations, and got data from two other studies in which he (not the authors) claims to have found those many extra mutations, using his own method of extracting mutations from the sequence data. That’s the suspect part.

The fact that he chose to publish these claim about radical new results in his employer’s vanity “journal” rather than a proper scientific journal is a red flag. If he’s correct and he’s managed to find the “true” mutation rate, then that would be certainly be a result of great interest to the broader scientific community, and I’m sure he’d be able to publish the results in a good scientific journal. That would certainly be worth more than publishing in AIG’s “journal” It would be a great coup for AIG, to have one of their scientists publish in a real scientific journal about some secular results that have implications for human origins.

Either he tried and didn’t pass peer-review, or he didn’t bother, likely because he has little confidence in his claims. I don’t see any other reason that he would not want to publish in a secular journal.