Dsterncardinale's Review of Traced by Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson

Except for the timeline…

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Wrong, Valerie, it shows both language spread and genetic admixture.

The red dates are explicitly “Iran-like ancestry spread (genetic data)” and the text further confirms:

Map shows admixture dates in thousands of years ago (red) based on Table S2 and Semitic languages dispersals estimated by Kitchen et al. (2009) from lexical data (blue).

But there is no evidence that such a migration occurred in this time period.

No Valerie, not “somehow” – the paper clear states that the Arabian lineage came from the Levant, which contradicts Jeanson’s fantasy novel.

Ah yes, Valerie’s sexual supermen. :roll_eyes:

But as you likewise present no evidence of such a person (or small group) breeding up a whole population, nor even of circumstances likely to be conducive to such a genetic eruption (e.g. the existence of a powerful despot with a thousand wives and/or concubines, in the right time and place), this must remain your private fantasy.

No Valerie. It does “matter” that this whole scenario you have confected not only lacks evidence, but is highly unlikely to have happened, and for which you have presented no evidence raising that probability.

This matters, because there is therefore no more evidence for your scenario, than there is for my teleporting space aliens again coming in and interbreeding with local females and now spreading E1b1b2 that way.

Given your (and Jeanson’s) abject failure to present any evidence of his fantasy genetic migrations, I must ascribe your continued advocacy of his views to Motivated Reasoning.

And wouldn’t you know it, we have evidence of Stone Age Eb1b in Spain. Even taking YEC-dating of the Stone Age, this is well before Jeanson’s timeframes for it to escape out via East Africa, Arabia, and North Africa:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1113061108

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YEC do though; the book sold out and is back to pre-order.

Yeah, but I assume it fits his timeline great.

Let me read through the paper again. Just skimmed some sections besides the Y-chromosome data.

It’s a known migration path and there was known mixing of culture in the time period given. Your assertion of no evidence isn’t valid.

I didn’t see that it noted at all where it came from, but I’ll read it again.

I thought I didn’t fully understand drift. I really think you don’t. Also, please delete your other comments that don’t meet the standards of this forum.

Considering that the same mutations are likely to happen more than once if the rate is high and if they’re not totally random, and that determining what parts of ancient DNA are reliable is difficult, I think it’s rather impossible to place ancient DNA on a Y-chromosome tree accurately.

  1. The bare fact that it is a “known migration path” is not evidence that it was used for a migration at the required time and in the right direction to fit Jeanson’s fantasy novel. It merely establishes that a migration might occur if the circumstances were right. Those circumstances would require at the right place and time that (i) a potential migrant population with desire to migrate (e.g. due to overpopulation, famine, etc) exists, and (ii) a feasible migration destination existed (e.g. a depopulated area, an area whose local population was sufficiently friendly, or whose local population was sufficiently militarily inferior). Lacking evidence that these circumstances existed, and that an actual migration occured because of them, the “known migration path” is not evidence of an actual migration at the right time and in the right direction.

  2. What evidence do you have that this “mixing of culture in the time period” occurred, and that it was eastwards from the Horn of Africa into Southern Arabia, rather than in the opposite direction?

It’s in the chart I posted.

You are correct – you don’t. The fact that you don’t understand it seems to allow you to make heroic assumptions about its capabilities (whereas somebody who understood it better would likely be aware of its constraints).

I don’t have a handle of the math of it, but I do think I have a reasonable handle on it on an intuitive level.

The probability of some genetic variants getting fixed in a population is a certainty. The probability of a specific genetic variant (i.e. that brought into the population by a single individual, or small group) is very low, baring extenuating circumstances. Such extenuating circumstances must allow for the new entrants to breed at rates far exceeding the local population. This might be the despot scenario I mentioned, the massacre of a sizeable portion of the local males, or other scenarios. But whatever it was it would have had to have been a sufficiently substantial event that it could not help but leave evidence of its occurrence.

As to my specific wording, I would note the following. This scenario is not even remotely likely without a small number of men having a(n extremely) large number of sons. Given that they would have had daughters as well, this means an even larger number of children. This could not happen without them having sex with a large number of women. The numbers involved would seem to require a superhuman breeding capacity. Hence “sexual supermen”. I would also point out that it is highly unlikely that breeding on this scale would be entirely consensual. I am sorry that you did not understand the implications of the scenario you were positing, but I don’t think it is unreasonable to point them out.

That this could have occurred, without leaving any evidence, is fantastical, hence my calling it a “fantasy”. It is not a scenario that appears to be contained in Jeanson’s book, so it would appear to be your own, and thus “private”, or personal, scenario.

There are multiple problems with this line of thought.

  1. We are not talking about a single mutation, but a long chain of them to get to Eb1b. The probability of getting, from whatever Jeanson thinks was the endemic Y-haploid in Spain, to Eb1b de novo (rather than from E to E1 to E1b) would be exceedingly small. You’d need to talk to an actual geneticist to find out how small.

  2. If we assume that Eb1b could have simply spontaneously arisen in Spain, then it is perfectly feasible that it reached North Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar, rather than via the circuitous route of East Africa, the Bab-el-Mandeb, Arabia, and Sinai. We can then likewise assume that R1b likewise could have simply spontaneously arisen in Ireland, etc, etc. This does not so much support Jeanson’s fairy tale as render it completely unnecessary.

The trouble is that there is no more evidence of migrations happening in Jeanson’s timeframe of the last 6 thousand years than there is for 12 thousand, 3 thousand, or probably 3 million. And if we take your absurd speculations about how you think genetic drift and ancient DNA work, there’s no more evidence for it than for any completely random set of migration paths and times.

So we have Nathaniel Jeanson, a not geneticist, taking not mutation data off a screen-shot of somebody else’s work, and using it to calculate the wrong type of mutation rate for a molecular clock – with the results that his timeframes no more fit the historical evidence than any other random timeframe would – it’s only advantage is in fact that it fits YEC preconceptions.

That, under these circumstances, “YEC do though [take Jeanson seriously]”, is a damning indictment of the utter thoughtless credulity of the YEC community, rather than any evidence of Jeanson’s credibility.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Though in this case, the metaphoric “one-eyed man” would appear to be also suffering from myopia, color-blindness and severe astigmatism. :roll_eyes:

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Now you’re just making stuff up with no regard to whether it is reasonable or is based on evidence. That is textbook motivated reasoning. Rather than following evidence you’re making up a story to explain away inconvenient data.

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This is a great illustration of why and for whom this book was written. This is the intended use.

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Well of course they do. He’s telling them what they want to hear. Jeanson is in his words “looking at the data through Biblical glasses”

The point is there’s no actual legitimate science in Jeanson’s work. By his own admission he’s merely rationalizing the science to fit his religious beliefs. No one who knows what they are talking about are taking Jeanson’s work seriously AS SCIENCE. It doesn’t matter how many books he sells to like minded Christian fans.

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Considering that we’re discussing haplotypes here, what’s your point?

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I’ll just quote a comment I wrote in other thread just the other day, because I think it is equally apt here. In fact, I had this thread in mind when I wrote the comment.

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It will be interesting to track how Traced will be received compared to how Replacing Darwin was received.

First of all, in this 2019 interview Jeanson explains that the intended audience of his book, Replacing Darwin, was his unbelieving scientist classmates

This is what Jeanson said, starting at minute 4:30:

I wrote the book I wish I had when I was a student to hand to my unbelieving or evolutionary classmates. Something that they could pick up, that there was nothing that would turn them off, in the sense that when I wrote it, I made sure that I had a picture of someone in that category, an unbeliever basically. So I could look at it and always be reminded, they do not know anything about the Bible, they do not assume anything about the Bible, they are not asking questions about the Bible, they are not asking questions about creation. Darwin settled it. So I have to find a way on every page to make them think, “Oh wait a minute, that is not something I thought of. Maybe I should reconsider this. That challenges what I took for granted” So they have to keep turning and I slowly reveal an answer to them, show them answers instead of telling them and of maybe being in your face about it. Instead I have to lure them into this topic and by the end of the book have them say, “Whoa, I never saw this coming, I didn’t know there was so much scientific evidence against what I was saying and in support of another idea. There is good scientific evidence for the creation model, what we have been told in the court system is wrong.” So many of those points will come through. And really that was my goal: to have a comprehensive one-stop. We are going to take you where you are right now, “yes evolution is true” Gonna take you where you are right now, even if you do not know anything about genetics, which is really where the debate is right now, and walk them through 10 chapters of science, put the gospel at the end, take them through A-Z and show them where the debate is really at today

Based on the reception from scientists, it seems he has failed in that goal.

It is also interesting to note that the book did not pick up much interest or reception from his creation scientist colleagues, either, as explained by Joel Duff, who blogs at Naturalis Historia

I have been surprised at how little discussion “Replacing Darwin” has generated among the YEC community. Of course, part of the problem is that there are only a handful of people in that community who would even be able to evaluate, much less even understand, Jeanson’s claims. Some of those few were given the opportunity to comment on the manuscript, but we don’t know what they thought about it because most have been rather silent about the book.

We can see an example from this past summer at the most influential gathering of YECs, the International Creation Conference (ICC). Jeanson did not even present a paper following the publication of a book that was supposed to unseat Darwin himself! This gathering of YEC experts from around the world included all who would have been able to assess at least some aspects of Dr. Jeanson’s work. There were several papers presented at the conference addressing the origins of biological diversity. For example, the presentations included a discussion of the formation of the “eKinds project.” This project is outlined in a paper related to the talk. Interestingly, the paper references Anderson, Lightner, O’Micks, Terborg, Tomkins and Wood, all YECs who have written about biological “kinds” and mechanisms of their origins–i.e. Jeanson’s peers with respect to the topic of his book. Who is conspicuously missing? That’s right, there is not a single reference to Jeanson, “Replacing Darwin” or any of his other publications. Likewise, a paper proposing an alternative mechanism of adaptation and diversification references Jeanson twice but only in the context of disagreeing with Jeanson’s interpretation of mtDNA data. This eKinds paper was written and submitted at least six months after Jeanson’s book was released and several years after his primary journal contributions. This is quite remarkable. I have noticed a similar trend among other YEC writers who discuss kinds and speciation. It appears that Jeanson is widely ignored by his own peers! If Jeanson is not impacting his YEC peers, why should anyone outside the YEC community pay attention? Before Jeanson can expect the broader scientific community to sit up and take notice of his ideas, he needs to first establish his model as mainstream among his YEC colleagues.

I keep track of a large number of discussion boards that include YECs. “Replacing Darwin” moved the needle in discussions for a few weeks after the release of the book, but subsequent mentions have since fallen quiet. I have YEC friends who participate in exclusively-YEC discussion sites that tell me the same thing. The silence is deafening. In 2016 Jeanson asked the question: Why Don’t More People Accept the Young-Earth View of Speciation? His response: “In summary, evolutionists are unaware of our scientific literature; and even when they become aware, they appear to prefer ignorance of the key scientific details.” I suggest he might consider asking a similar question: Why don’t more of my YEC colleagues accept my understanding of speciation?

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I don’t know if Jeanson is being manipulative or he’s just stupid. He keeps saying things like “evolutionists don’t know our scientific literature”.

I have a suggestion for him that might help. ACTUALLY PUBLISH YOUR WORK IN SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS! Scientists don’t go looking to the webpages of religious ministries for any scientific research.

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And that ladies and gentlemen is what being disingenuous looks like. He’s basically admitting he’s burying his actual agenda. There’s such an arrogance in what Jeanson said s doing and a general clueless of how he comes off. I’ve never seen anyone so tone deaf. I think even Hovind is more self aware than this.

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Ok, took a few minutes to look up Aksum which is mentioned as the hypothesis for E1b1b migration into Arabia. Wikipedia says a bunch of Ethiopians settled in Yemen.

No, the E1b1b2 lineage isn’t in the chart you posted because it goes back to 39 kya and is in Yemen. The chart/map only goes back to 4.4 kya and suggests a Levantine origin.

No, I don’t see why that is the case - you mentioned famine, military conquest as reasons to migrate but they’re also reasons for lineages to be extinguished. For example, if the migrating military population kills off many of the native males and then has a slightly higher rate of male births than the native males, I don’t see a reason why y-chromosome replacement wouldn’t happen extremely quickly. Throw in maybe a bit of positive selection because of a reduction in inbreeding, and it might even happen more quickly. The same could be said for disease or environmental disasters that kill native men at random more than recent migrants, but perhaps at a lesser rate than military conquest.

I appreciated the “now” in that sentence. :smiling_face: Yes, I was being quite assertive in that statement: Mutations not being random is really a prediction of mine based on some recent papers, and ancient y-chromosomes being unable to be placed accurately on a tree because of a high mutation rate + unreliability is something I do not know but was contemplating. That also is a prediction. In the papers I’ve looked at there sometimes seem to be wild swings between really ancient subhaplogroups and really recent ones - like one specimen is R1b and another is E1b2b1b1a1b2 or something similar with both having the same radiometric date in the same area. Perhaps that makes sense with genetic drift in the current paradigm, but it does make me go hmmm…

The intended use is an apologetic for biblical authority for sure. For both Christians and non-Christians to consider.

But the irony doesn’t escape me as far as the timeline goes that when I started asking questions about this in the forum two years ago, I couldn’t find anyone that believed Jeanson was telling the truth there were only a handful of y-chromosome studies that gave an explicit de novo mutation rate - the 3 (plus the one that is a screenshot :upside_down_face:) I’ve read so many regional y-chromosome studies recently that assume the timeline/mutation rate and don’t think to include it in their study. It’s fascinating that perhaps Laurits Skov could have made a huge discovery but just shrugged and figured their filtering wasn’t very conservative, or even the dozens of co-authors with Karmin could have, but they had no interest in double-checking the timeline. So now, right or wrong, we have Jeanson. Whether his methods with others’ sequencing are amateurish or genius really depends on the results in 50 years, I think. :slightly_smiling_face: Also, @Joel_Duff was wrong tonight - I remember Jeanson saying in a video he figured the rate was slow like it was for mtDNA (and so the two other studies changed his mind). Probably hadn’t researched the implications of the rate before that.

Read the entire Bible. You’d find your hypothesis confirmed - everything from Elijah’s mocking of Baal prophets and David’s psalms to Paul’s cultural analysis.

I agree with this. So I’m curious to see what will happen in the next 5 or so years.

@dsterncardinale would you be willing to write a (respectful but pointed) review of the science in Traced for us at PS?

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I’d be happy to.

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Do you realize that this is not directly relevant to TMRCA calculations?

No, that’s quite clear right now. The authors who generated the data he uses say it isn’t reliable. That most of the differences he uses don’t reflect actual differences in the sequences.

It’s just compounding errors. “Calculate” a per-generation mutation rate based on data that, according to the authors who collected them, are not precise enough to do that kind of calculation, and then take that faulty rate and calculate a series of times to MRCA based on the assumption that the occurrence of a mutation within a population is equivalent to its fixation within that population.

I don’t know how else to put this. This is a con, and you are the mark.

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I’ve already covered this Valerie. Aksum was ejected from Yemen by the Persians a few decades after they invaded. So they would have had minimal effect.

Actually both haplogroups appear to have originated via the Levant:

The haplogroup common in Natufians, E1b1b, is also frequent in our dataset, with most lineages coalescing ∼8.3 (7–9.7) kya, though we also found a rare deeply divergent Y chromosome, which coalesces 39 kya (Figure S2).

Natufian culture

Do you have any evidence of famine, a “migrating military population” or that “many of the native males” were killed off, at this time and place? (The Aksum conquest seems to have been fought more through a series of palace coups against local monarchs than through wholesale invasion of the Himyarite Kingdom.)

But I don’t hold my breath, as I have yet to see any relevant evidence from Valerie on this topic – just a long stream of far far less than well-developed theories that she desperately hopes will rescue some small sliver of credibility for Jeanson’s fantasy novel.

[I originally phrased the above more emphatically, but that is apparently “inappropriate” :roll_eyes: ]

I will note that you have completely failed to address my summary point:

This in turn leads me to suspect that the following hypothesis may be true:

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This.

@thoughtful, how do you view Jeanson’s claim that he’s writing this not for YECs, but for other scientists, while at the same time not responding to an invitation to discuss his book with other scientists, many of whom have significant expertise in the fields allegedly addressed by the book?

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I notice that I have been using the word “evidence” a lot lately on this thread.

I also notice that I have been playing whack-a-mole on what I would consider to be considerably less than well-developed, let alone well-substantiated, ideas attempting to reconcile Jeanson’s thesis with the historical evidence.

I’d like to step back and offer an example, a purposefully silly example.

I might, if I felt so inclined, claim that my uncle is the Pope.

In defense of this claim, I might say that my uncle is, by definition, a man, and that men are elected Pope every few decades, so that it is possible that my uncle could be the Pope.

I might then expect to be laughed at, and rightly so. :slight_smile:

I might, if I was lucky, then be able to show that my uncle is Catholic and/or a priest – that would only make my claim slightly less ludicrous, and would not be considered probative evidence that my uncle was the Pope.

If I wanted to show that it was even a reasonable possibility, I’d have to show something like that my uncle had been a cardinal (as nobody else has a non-negligible chance of becoming Pope). But the ‘gold standard’ would still be to present evidence (i) that this person had been elected Pope, and (ii) that this person was in fact my uncle.

I cannot help but feel that I’ve been whacking down ideas that fall somewhere between bald “my uncle is the Pope” and “my uncle is Catholic and/or a priest”.

To be worth even taking remotely seriously, these ideas would need to include the following evidence. (i) Who was migrating where, and when. (ii) How many were migrating. (iii) How successful they were, in terms how long they stayed in control of the region, how extensive was their control (only the cities, or also the hinterland?), how thoroughly they were erased by the next invaders, etc. (iv) Specific evidence of any extenuating circumstances (famines, massacres, etc) that might lead them to leaving an outsized genetic footprint. (v) Evidence that this migrating group contained the specific y-haplogroup in question.

However, even this would still mean that we would have to overcome the following two stumbling blocks:

  1. Evidence that the calculations on which Jeanson bases his timeframes are badly malformed, on multiple levels.

  2. Widespread (one might even say pervasive) evidence that these Y-haplotypes had already been in place since the Stone Age in many (most?) of the areas under consideration.

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We’ll, TMRCA and y-chromosome Adam are obviously different things; other than that, not sure what your point is.

Based on the quotes from the authors in their paper and emails, they don’t know that; they just think so. I do not see any reason they think so other than that they believe the mutation rate should be what other scientists have said it was in the past.

I’ve watched enough videos from Jeanson and a few from Carter that I pretty much know how this research went from their off-the-cuff remarks. I wasn’t sharing info on Carter but I will just to explain I know I’m not being conned: He and Carter were working together on the uniparentally inherited DNA. Jeanson explained at some point he thought the rate was slow. Eventually he saw these few papers and was thinking about what it would mean if the rate was actually fast. Carter didn’t think the “clock” would be consistent enough because of his thoughts on what he calls “patriarchal drive” as well as other things he’s written about more recently. He doesn’t believe historical infererences can be reliably made and perhaps they also parted always on whether the fast mutation rate could be used if not explicitly published. Jeanson came up with branching matching population growth. He moved forward based on that research.

Anyway, I’ve researched enough on my own to be very convinced that the mainstream clock/mutation rate is not correct, but I’m not certain that Jeanson is right on every point. I think it’s actually good that Carter and Jeanson don’t agree; one will eventually convince the other of various points But anyway, no one is creating a con, of that I’m also certain. They could be mistaken, sure. But I’ve also felt that after I understood Jeanson’s population growth argument better after reading the book, it worked well, and I think perhaps he’ll convince Carter he’s right with more data. So far no one in the forum has explained why the hypothesis doesn’t work, or explained it in a way that convinced me it doesn’t work. That’s why I keep asking questions because I’m curious about whether it is solid or not. :slightly_smiling_face: Using the mutation rate he did is a huge risk for him and his audience without a solid hypothesis to back it up.