Graduate physical anthropology student Erika, aka YouTuber @GutsickGibbon, has steadily been building a following by posting an interspersed mix of educational and debunking videos. It must be aggravating to big budget YEC organizations that they are being effectively challenged by someone who just holds a mike and talks, but they have done their best to not respond in order to not draw attention to her. Creationists prefer to designate high name recognition antagonists such as Dawkins and Bill Nye, rather than scientists who deconstruct YEC claims specifically and in detail.
As Erika’s viewership has routinely reached tens of thousands, and occasionally broken one hundred thousand, she has become increasingly hard to ignore. What really got attention was a two hour video where she, in detail and full view, duplicated the work of YEC go to geneticist Jeffrey Tomkins; which left incompetence or malfeasance as the two options, not necessarily mutually exclusive, accounting for his results on Human - Chimp genetic similarity.
TLDR: Tomkins makes multiple methodological mistakes a man of his education shouldn’t make. When pressed on it (by other creationists) he obfuscates. Some creationists (such as Rob Carter) have clearly realized Tomkins is untrustworthy, but won’t directly admit to this publicly, so have become really weaksauce, vague, and mealy-mouthed in their bad-faith dismissals of Erika.
There’s this statement Aron Ra has been saying for years now(paraphrasing from memory): Sooner or later a creationist will have to decide whether to remain honest, or remain a creationist.
Creationists like Tomkins, Rob Carter, Nathaniel Jeanson and so on have made their choice.
Oh yeah, also, you can’t publish in the answers research[sic] journal if your work in any way contradicts anything by a creationist. It’s a conclusion first, rationalization second kind of journal and explicitly so.
Yes, and that has a part in this saga. Glenn Williamson was the programmer who uncovered the buggy Blast results that played a role in the initial 70% similarity figure Tomkins published in Answers Research Journal (ARJ). Williamson submitted a formal paper to ARJ detailing this, but it was refused by AiG’s Snelling, despite the clear link with the prior Tomkins paper. Ultimately, ARJ published a response instead by Tomkins himself, depriving the discoverer of his own voice, and only referencing his work with this drive by line:.
However, in 2014 , a computer programmer of financial trading algorithms discovered an apparent bug in the BLASTN algorithm and notified this author of the situation (Glenn Williamson, Tibra Capital, personal communication).
Somehow, what should have been a straight up retraction is presented as discovery with Tomkins as the principle author.
So what credit does Tomkins extend subsequent to all this? At 1:14:24 of the Apologetics 101 interview, Tomkins dismisses Williamson’s critique of his further work as “bogus”, while going along with his characterization as “nefarious”. Oh the dastardly villainy of identifying creationist errors.
Well, this is a surprise. She starts out that video with a serious error, the claim that humans and chimps are 98.8% similar in a comparison of protein-coding regions. But the actual figure for that is 99.5% similar, and the 98.8% is a measure of the similarity of all alignable sites, most of which are of course in junk DNA. She’s mis-citing the chimp genome paper.
