Hi Everyone, here is a video summarizing my results on replicating the work of Jeffery Tomkins:
His 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2018 papers are all discussed. I will hopefully produce a writeup when I get the time as well.
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Kudos for putting in the hard work!! I will have to check it out when I have a chance.
Tomkins’ multiple attempts to cast doubt on the scientific consensus have long been a source of comedy. They are wonderful examples of what happens to logic and reason when someone is forced to land on a specific conclusion. If my memory is still working, one of the more hilarious attempts involved a methodology that said two identical DNA sequences were really something like 88% similar. When he blasted the sequences he averaged all of the hits instead of taking the percent similarity of the top hit. Go figure. Another attempt excluded gapped sequences so a single indel resulted in much lower similarity than what it was in reality. At this point, I have to assume he is cooking the books on purpose.
Side comment: Am I the only one who thinks Tomkins could be brothers with Steve Carell?
Is the write-up going to be the paper reviewed by PS and published here as was discussed? Or is that a different thing?
Great presentation Erika.
I found Tomkin’s response to the weighting issue strange. Why not weight the data? It’s an obvious improvement, at no cost, and rookie easy. That is what Excel was born for; it is not as if anyone would notice a spreadsheet take longer to refresh. I did it routinely in engineering even when it scarcely mattered.
Just watched this through in it’s entirety. Fantastic work Erika.
I love how using Tomkins method a human chromosome is like 83-88% similar to itself. ROFL!
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“It can’t be incompetence so it must be deception.”
You have reached enlightenment.
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Great video Ericka!!
Like many experiences with creationists, I always get this picture in my head:
Ungapped and weighted? Why don’t you gap the comparison, Jeffrey?
Now it’s gapped and UNWEIGHTED!!! What happened Jeffrey?
You get the runup to the ball, and then it is pulled away.
Is it on purpose? If you are a plant geneticist with a PhD, how could all of this be an accident? I don’t see how it could. At what point is this level of incompetence equivalent to deceit? It boggles the mind.
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They aren’t equivalent. It’s been deceit all along.
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I have to agree. What’s more is that it shows through the email exchanges that the people at AIG like Snelling and others have been complicit in the deception. All of their crap excuses for not allowing roohif to publish his rebuttal in AIG’s in-house (and now absolutely proven to be nothing but a) propaganda outlet.
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I’m reminded of Henry Morris’s blatant quote mines, and Duane Gish continuing to use falsehoods about peroxide/hydroquinone reactions after being proved wrong in his previous debate.
This is just a continuation of the same attitude - truth is irrelevant, what matters is whether your audience will spot the lies.
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Bullfrog!!!
The bullfrog incident is still one of my favorites.
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The fact they keep these articles on their website without even an errata says it all. “Bearing false witness” has no meaning at AiG.
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It’s just the Culture War, not any real religion.
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Do you realize that you are using the phrase “bearing false witness” in a way that is outside of its Biblical usage, and thus are trading on the cultural, emotional force of the phrase in an illegitimate manner?
Of course, you are not the first one to do this. Another person has been doing it for at least 14 years, both on BioLogos and here.
Side note: “an errata” is incorrect grammar. “A list of errata” would convey your meaning correctly.
I wasn’t aware that lying is just fine for Christians.
Erratum would actually be the best term.
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No, because you referred to “these articles” with the suggestion of several errors spread over the articles. Therefore you want to use the Latin plural noun, not the Latin singular. Hence, I suggested, “list of errata”, or, if you regard the notion “list of” as implicitly included in the term “errata”, then “errata” without the “an” would have served.
Your answer shows that you did not know what I meant. In the Hebrew Bible, “bearing false witness” first appears in the Laws. In the Ten Commandments, the phrase refers to giving false testimony in legal matters. That is, it relates to reporting falsely in court or assembly about what people have said or done. It does not refer to presenting misleading information about scientific matters. It is not about “truth-telling” in general, but about truth-telling in court. You’re trying to appeal to the gravitas of the Ten Commandments language, but using it out of context. If you want to say that the writers at AIG are intellectually dishonest, are lying about the facts of nature, etc., go ahead, but that is not what is meant by “bearing false witness.”
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Please look at how this is done in the scientific literature.
And Eddie tries to hide in a cloud of semantics.
AiG lies. They do it all of the time. Do you think this is proper behavior for Christians?
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We’d love to publish that write up :).
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I of course come from the humanities, not the medical and life sciences. It may be that in recent scientific literature, the term “erratum”, though singular in Latin, is being used more loosely than it traditionally was, and can now include not just a single error but more than one. In any case, the examples I looked at from your webpage were all corrections of single errors, so for those, “erratum” would be correct even in traditional usage. But my original point was that “an errata” is bad grammar, because “an” is singular, and “errata” is plural. So I was addressing not “scientific literature”, but what you wrote.
No cloud of semantics, though if you aren’t skilled in reading comprehension, my precise and lucid explanation might have seemed that way to you. But I suspect you dismiss it as “semantics” to avoid admitting you misused the phrase.
That may well be true. I don’t read their material. Not being a creationist, I wouldn’t be interested in it.
Do I think lying is proper for a Christian? No, not as a rule, though there might be times when it is justified. For example, if a crowd of people was out to lynch a black man, and I saw where the black man went, and they asked me, and I told them I didn’t know where he went, that would be lying, but it would be lying for a Christian motive – to save a life. Lying about normal academic or scientific matters, no, normally that would not be justified. But merely disagreeing with the majority on a matter of judgment is not lying. For example, Behe thinks that Darwinian processes alone could not have produced a flagellum. He could be wrong, but he’s certainly not “lying”, just coming to a different conclusion from that of diehard Darwinians. Tour thinks it’s extremely unlikely that life originated by chance. He could be wrong about that, but he’s certainly not “lying”, if that’s his sincere judgment as a synthetic chemist.