EvoGrad reviews Jeanson's "Replacing Darwin"

Our own @evograd has released his review of Chapter 7 of Nathaniel Jeanson’s “Replacing Darwin.” Its an impressive effort to tackle what Jeanson thinks is his evidence that species have arisen less than 10,000 years ago from independently created kinds. Evograds review is longer than Jeanson’s chapter as he tackles, in detail, each of Jeanson’s claims. I expect that this will be the definitive response to Jeanson’s main evidence and should provide Jeanson with an excellent primer on genetic variation and mutation rates which hopefully he will use to reflect on his own work.
Read his whole post here:

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Wow, that’s really some yeoman’s work from EvoGrad! We all owe him an e-beer. :slightly_smiling_face:

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This is to complicated a subject for me but i canned parts of it and the summery.
This is a excellent YEC prrsentation on this subject WHERE YEC is attacked all the time for not doing science at this intimate level. Jeanson did a great job.
All this mutation rate stuff is impossible to verify and leaves out the glory of biology to not do what humans expect it to do. mutation rates is modern alchemy . nobody knows what the boundaries are for them.
I suspect mutations are only special cases of the ability of genes to change as needed. Under some mechanism, after thresholds are crossed…
Its really another RATE claim by evolutionists. The claim things change in the past as they do now.
Mutationism is just too porly understood to be a serious fact to show evolutioniary biology as a viable hypothesis.
Anyways thanks for it as it does show YEC science papers like this must be dealt with by modern evolutionism if it wants to defend itself s credibility.

You say Jeanson did “great work”, then immediately say the basis of all of his arguments is “impossible to verify”?

It’s a “RATE” claim by Jeanson.

Jeanson’s work doesn’t have to be “dealt with by modern evolutionism”. I didn’t realise that some random grad student keen on procrastination suddenly became a representative of “modern evolutionism”. I didn’t review Jeanson’s claims to “defend evolution’s credibility” in the sense that Jeanson’s work is 'threatening". I was curious about Jeanson’s book because it purports to contain the “cutting edge” of creation science. Unsurprisingly, I found fatal flaws to his work so I decided to write about it so other people can see how flawed his work is as well. If you think pointing out flaws in someone’s work is a surefire sign of “feeling threatened” or something like that, I can’t help you.

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That took a lot of work @evograd. Great job. I hope that you are engaged on this.

It, also, is import to have all the details and rhetoric right on this one, as it might be the first and only in depth review of this part of the book. If any issues are identifiable, please do say something, so @evograd can correct it before it gets deeper scrutiny.

I for one have some questions when @Art or @glipsnort (and I) have some time.

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I’ve just published a follow-up to EvoGrad’s review of Jeanson. I don’t critique the content of the book directly. Rather I take a look at the responses that Jeanson’s book has evoked. My feeling is probably best summed up in these lines from that post:

“If Jeanson is not impacting his 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.”

This is in reference to my observation that the few other YECs that have any training in population genetics don’t appear to rushing to Jeanson’s defense. In fact, the YEC community is rather quiet about Jeanson.

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By the way, thanks for that review.

What I find amusing, is the way that Jeanson tried to use the Linnaeus classification as an alternative to evolution. The YECs must be desperate if they try that. If anything, the work of Linnaeus is what leads one to think of the possibility of common descent.

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To clarify, you mean his “YEC peers”?

Ah, yes. Correct. His colleagues at AiG seem to be buying into his work though only one might have any ability to evaluate it. The problem is that outside that rather small world, though it has an out-sized influence, other YECs are not picking up the ball and running with it. I believe Jeanson is working with one organizationally unaffiliated biologist on some further projects but of the other YECs that might be able to evaluate his work, I’ve seen no evidence that they think he is on the right path. At best they talk about his work in vague terms. Even the recommendations on the back of book don’t actually fully endorse the conclusions of the book but rather just talk about the book being thought-provoking, fresh, or unique.

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I would suggest editing that in your post. I first misread it as the circular taunt that until he convinces secular scientists, secular scientists should not take him seriously.

[quote=“swamidass, post:10, topic:2496, full:true”]

Thanks. Done

@Herman_Mays, your review is referenced here.

@Herman_Mays’s conversation about this on Paulogia is quite good:

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Reading EvoGrad’s post now… One thing: The ‘Geological Tangent’ could be placed near the end or in an appendix. The discussion may follow the order of Jeanson’s chapter but it distracts from the discussion of the molecular data.

The discussion on the “time-dependent rate slowdown” effect was good. I can’t recall many other creation/evolution online resources that makes the case as clearly.

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because folks use funny names I don’t know who is who. So evograd , i guess, is the reviewer.
I use my real name but whatever.
Yes even jeanson using RATES is murky at best. His point is that evolutionist rates, just using theirs and/or some agreement with them, STILL doesn’t work.

Those who have the ability, like you, to understand these things, like Jeanson, are the small circles that deal with evolutionary biology. you are a representative. of the modern evolutionist world. You went to school for it, to get degrees to use to declare your authority, and get paid i presume one day.
Yes it matters you agreed a review was needed. Your right. He did a important contribution to the subject and rightly was seen to needed to be replied too.
Thanks for your recommendation that Jeanson was yet another yEC trying to bring careful scientific investigation to complicated things.
I hope Jeanson reads your review and comments on it even on this blog.
its worthy to comment on.

Origin issues is all just a small world. in fact I never get an answer from evolutionists of how many there are if its a job. Degrees and salary. Some try to say all biologists or some clowns all scientists.
I suspect its only in the thousands in North America. Doing some paper and getting a few citations and then teaching high school doesn’t count as a active evolutionist. One must be active.
Organized creationism is small circles too.
this subject deals with unsexy complicated things. Very fw people could keep up.
Jeansons work is for a few creationists to study and add to their ideas and then to reach the public.
I’m sure creationist publications have pushed his stuff as far as public interest allows.

The only sense in which a review was “needed” was so there was a resource out there for people to see the glaring flaws in Jeanson’s work. A reply was “needed” because Jeanson is trying to persuade lay people of falsehoods, not because he “did a important contribution to the subject”.

What? Where did I say that? The opposite is true. Jeanson brought very sloppy analyses to complicated things.

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@John_Harshman, what do you make of Figure 6? Why do you think there is a discordance between pedigree mutation rates and substitution rates. I have a view, but wanted to calibrate off of you.

Do you disagree with the explanation I give in the blog post?

There’s a difference between mutation rate and substitution rate because some mutations are deleterious? Did you have something else in mind?