Yes it is.
(Added later - it’s actually the UCSC genome browser. Sorry for any confusion this caused.)
Oops, thanks! I think I might actually be able to do that much on my own, and a pretty impressive demonstration.
Sal, regardless of what you think of the dinosaurs soft tissue argument, I think you can agree that he made some glaring errors regarding genome sequence comparisons. A good talk is more than coming down on “the right side” of particular issues. Wouldn’t you agree?
I’ve said before he’s made some errors, and this is an error, but not glaring. Our exons are very similar to chimps. I see it in the gene browsers too.
Sure, but what he either doesn’t know, or decided not to tell the audience, is that the introns and intergenic regions are very similar, too.
Do you think he doesn’t know, or do you think he simply withheld that information?
1 Like
But, in addition to what @cwhenderson has just explained to you, the exons are 1/10 as different as he claimed (0.5% vs. 5%). That’s two glaring errors just in that single genetic distance claim.
1 Like
I think he got supplied bad info or was mistaken.
The literature and scoring methods aren’t that transparent.
I for one have seen exons 100% identical, I don’t where the 5% figure comes from, but I’ve cited it in the past (like 14 years ago) since that’s how I read the literature to the best of my ability.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that he’s a lying scoundrel, does that invalidate on scientific grounds his scientifically valid points?
Do you think he doesn’t know, or do you think he simply withheld that information?
I think he knows some claims of 5% which may or may not describe something else.
2005 National Geographic uses the figure of 4% difference:
And this is from a 2006 study which I myself cited shortly after its release from scientific American that says 6% difference:
A lot more genes may separate humans from their chimp relatives than earlier studies let on. Researchers studying changes in the number of copies of genes in the two species found that their mix of genes is only 94 percent identical. The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited figure of 1.5 percent.
The link to the original is dead. But I cited the above at UncommonDescent some years ago.
Who knows how we might score the sequence divergence differently since genes aren’t the only reason chimps and humans are different.
That said, this is like straining at gnats and letting camels through.
Ayala a Biologos may have blown it on Alus, we don’t know for sure yet. Are there differences in the Alu processing between humans and chimps?
[I contributed some of the data to Rupe and Sanford’s book that dealt with Alus.]
Has Ayala made a retraction yet? How long did it take Venema to make retractions? We can give Dr. Tour a little space. If he distrusts what some people say who are eager to criticize him, I don’t blame him. So even if you point it out to him, I’m not so sure he would be eager to accept your word for it given the figure of 2% doesn’t look stable to me.
Finally, what would you suggest is his motivation to lie or withhold data? Are you insinuating he’s lying or withholding data to help creationists believe?
Do you think James Tour thinks a creationist is more likely to accept common descent with a figure of 98.5% vs. 95%? I see exons with 100% identity, that didn’t do much make me go back to believing in common descent like I once did, at best it moved the needle 3.5% for a season.
FWIW,
This data point stood out in this study about different mapping of centromeric DNA mapping to different chromosomes:
Organization and Evolution of Primate Centromeric DNA from Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequence Data
Phylogenetic analyses confirm that human and chimpanzee HOR alpha-satellites share a common origin [23] that is evolutionarily distinct from the flanking peripheral monomeric sequences. Every major human alpha-satellite suprachromosomal family shares homologous sequences with chimpanzee (Figures 6A and S5), despite the fact that they map to nonorthologous chromosomes between the two species (Table 3).
How did that happen? Are we going to just ignore how some centromere jumped from one chromosome to another? I guess it could happen, but still…
And Sal releases a great cloud of ink to mask his getaway.
6 Likes
?? So Tour doesn’t think centromeres can evolve?
2 Likes
I did not insinuate he was lying. I just asked a simple question. That was a very long non-answer.
1 Like
I said I think he was mistaken, assuming you’re representing what he actually said accurately.
Your question sounds like you’re suggesting “he simply withheld that information”.
WITHHELD? As in he knew a vital piece of information that might cast serious doubt on the case he was trying to make? Or rather ommitted because he felt it wasn’t materially important in relation to the rest of his case?
That was my observation about differences between chimps and humans. How do homologous centromeres end up mapped to different chromosomes between chimps and humans? Henikoff had some studies on centromeres and it bothered him. It’s too bad our sequencers can’t quite deal with the long repetitive regions very well.
The 99.5% similarity in exons doesn’t exactly solve problems like the centromere re-mapping nor other gaps between chimps and humans, like differences in Alu post transcriptional A-to-I editing that occurs from the transcribed Alus that occupy 11% of the genome.
Adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing shapes transcriptome diversity in primates - PMC
Do you have any reason to assume differently?
I believe I supplied the two most likely scenarios and asked which one you thought was more likely.
I find it curious that I heard him speak 13 months ago to an audience that would be familiar with genomic studies and said that the theory of evolution was “the only game in town” and yet had a completely different opinion in front of an audience of fundamentalist Christians. Something changed, and it surely wasn’t the scientific evidence.
2 Likes
Of course, “the only game in town”, could be taken a number of ways. For instance, he could be reiterating his claim that there exists a vast conspiracy of silence to squelch any mention of what he believes to be problems and doubts regarding the theory of evolution.
5 Likes