Looks like Nathaniel Jeanson has finally come around to reading my review of Traced.
When shown that the authors of the paper from which he derives his mutation rates from say that the information he’s after simply isn’t in their paper he says…
“No one cares what anyone’s opinion is” - Jeanson.
So Jeanson is saying that he doesn’t care about what the authors of the papers he cites have to say about the work that THEY DID and goes on to say that considering what authors have to say in regards to their own work is pseudoscience. What Jeanson is saying is that he doesn’t care about what any of his critics think regardless of their expertise or evidence because he already knows he’s right.
We care more about informed opinions than uninformed opinions. There are few people more informed as to the methods and limitations of a paper than the authors themselves. Jeanson’s opinion on all this is entirely uninformed. He has never sequenced or assembled a eukaryotic genome. He has no knowledge of the underlying population genetic theory. He’s never done this work. He has never published anything and never to my knowledge submitted anything in this field to the peer-review process. He mines other people’s work for bits and pieces to affirm a religious narrative while ignoring the rest and makes up methods as it suits him as he goes.
And saying I didn’t share contents of my email exchange with one of the authors of Maretty et al. is simply false. Direct quotes from those email exchanges with Laurits Skov were included in that post with the author’s permission.
If Jeanson wants an example of what pseudoscience is like look no further than AiG’s statement of faith. Jeanson like every employee at AiG is required to sign on to this as a condition of their employment…
“No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field of study, including science, history, and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture obtained by historical-grammatical interpretation. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information (Numbers 23:19; 2 Samuel 22:31; Psalm 18:30; Isaiah 46:9–10, 55:9; Romans 3:4; 2 Timothy 3:16).”
Nowhere have I or any professional working scientist I know of been required to commit to an a priori conclusion in spite of the data. In science you don’t commit to a conclusion first before you collect the data. Like Jeanson has said before he is looking at the data through “Biblical glasses”. In science we don’t don some magical lenses that would allow us to filter the world in a way that conforms to what we want to believe. That again is a hallmark of pseudoscience.
That said however Jeanson is very quick to criticize what he calls “secular scientists” (which just boils down to any scientists who don’t agree with him) for looking at data through an evolutionary lens and then with no sense of irony says what he is doing is looking at things through “Biblical glasses”.
Now, if Ken Ham wants to contractually release him from that agreement maybe that would at least help a little in taking Jeanson seriously as a scientist. But I doubt that will happen because AiG is about control. They don’t even allow Jeanson to publish a book without the approval of AiG leadership. Seldom if ever is this sort of top-down constraint on academic freedom part of any legitimate scientific institution.
Here’s another sign of pseudoscience. If Jeanson’s findings were so compelling and well supported by the available evidence then they would be published in the pages of Science and Nature and not buried on a religious ministry’s website. Ask yourself why that doesn’t happen. If your answer involves some organized conspiracy against Jeanson’s views then that too is a sign of pseudoscience.
What Jeanson is doing has ALL the hallmarks of pseudoscience.
I’ll also note no one asked me to respond to any of this on the ‘Striving for Eternity’ Youtube channel and Jeanson has shown zero interest in engaging with me in my criticism. I wonder why that is…
By the way, maybe someone can tell me what a gene tree from a population of constant size would look like if Jeanson’s method of counting branches to infer population size were correct. No one in Jeanson’s camp seems to be willing to answer that…
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