Hi Josh
I have not seen your analysis on his work. I would very much like to go through it.
We also canāt say that itās definitely not a fusion site. These kinds of statements are meaninglessly vacuous. No, we donāt have absolute certainty, but is that really the requirement for us to be very confident in what is ultimately a provisional conclusion?
It is tiresome that we have to spell out these basic things. Suffice it to say that there is only evidence for it being a site where two telomeres fused, and a lot of it, and no evidence against it. Hence the only rational option is to accept provisionally that it is a site of a chromosomal fusion, and to be highly confident in that conclusion.
No, even if there really was a functional gene spanning the locus(which there isnāt), it would not be evidence against it being the site of some ancestral chromosomal telomere-telomere fusion. That would merely imply that subsequently to the fusion, some functional gene emerged across that locus. A functional gene spanning a telomere-telomere fusion site isnāt evidence against a telomere-telomere fusion site looking exactly like a telomere-telomere fusion site.
Well except if ādefinitelyā means with absolute certainty, which is what Bill meant by the word. If thatās not what he meant by it, then his pathological need to even state it makes zero logical sense.
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If that is what he meant by it, thereās still no logical sense. What Bill means is that the evidence isnāt strong enough to come to a conclusion but that he leans toward created diversity, not fusion, because it suits his inclinations. There are many problems with that stance, one of them being that the evidence is indeed strong enough, but he wonāt look at it. He says itās spinach and to hell with it.
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At the risk of becoming a broken record:
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Iām trying to quit but itās become an addiction. I need help!
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There are pleasures in it, now and again. I have seen people absolutely shatter into a spectacular display of incoherent rage, which can be hilarious. But such moments are rare. More often, you just realize that youāre dealing with someone who sees his obstinacy as the thing that will earn him points toward some sort of reward to be bestowed at an indefinite future date.
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The first step, as they say, is admitting you have a problem.
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Is there a sort of group therapy meeting I can go to and tell them about my experiences? Internet Arguments Anonymous?
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You have to want help to be helpedā¦
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So, does chromosome 2 have two centromeres? And would that mean the spindle attaches at two points on the chromosome?
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Chromosome 2 has one functioning centromere and one non-function, degraded (cryptic) centromere.
This second centromere is easily recognisable by the presence of a large cluster of alphoid DNA repeats - something only found in centromeres. Itās also precisely where weād expect the cryptic centromere to be by lining it up with the unfused chromosome of chimps.
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At this point I do dismiss Tomkins out of hand. There is a limit to how many times you get the benefit of the doubt.
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To be clear here @glipsnort, you have looked into his work more than once, we both have. The conclusion was reliably the same, so the motivation to look into the details on yet another of his papers is going down. That is not the same thing as dismissing him out of hand.
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Quite. And if someone finds him persuasive, Iāll dig in again.
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It should be pointed out that his conclusion runs against all the evidence for common descent of humans and other primates. There must have been a chromosomal fusion given those relationships, and any attempt to argue against fusion must first dispose of the evidence of common descent. Which, as far as I know, he has never once even attempted.
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I want to reiterate something @David_MacMillan said earlier but got lost in the shuffle. I just attended an on-line YEC conference in which Kurt Wise gave a 40 minute presentation on Chromosome #2 fusion event. He began by reviewing all the evidence for a fusion. I was thinking to myself, wow he has spent 20 minutes making a powerful case for a fusion event. I couldnāt have made the case better myself. I wondered, so when does he turn the table and show how all of this evidence is wrong? Then to my surprise he concludes that the evidence is clear, there was a fusion event in history.
Wow. So then how does he explain this in history without invoking common ancestry? He concludes that Adam and Eve had 48 chromosomes. He would use the standard YEC reasons why the banding patterns and genes synteny are similar between human and ape chromosomes and concludes that two chromosomes experienced a fusion event after Adam and Eve. He suggests this happened either very soon after Adam and Even or possible in Noahās family at the Flood allowing this fusion to spread to all people today (including neanderthals which are descendants of Noahās family in the YEC timeline).
I really donāt understand why YECs have not taken this approach before. Rather than deny the plain evidence of fusion, why not just accept the it has happened but then find a way to include the event in their history of humans. I expect there will be some sort of paper from Wise on this in the not too distant future. YECs have invested so much time and effort trying to show that there is no evidence for chromosome fusion here that its going to be hard for many to reverse course and take the opposite view but Wise made it sound so simple and obvious I think he will win the day eventually.
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Todd Wood has suggested that humans and chimps began, at creation, with identical genomes, not just chromosome counts, and that the functional differences are not genetic but epigenetic.
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Thatās certainly not the first time Iāve seen that suggestion from YECs.
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The objective here is to make the conclusion based on the YEC model. We agree if common descent is the working hypothesis then the fusion event happened.
Why? Of course the conclusion is the same, given the direct evidence of fusion. But why are we required to assume YEC, ignoring all the evidence against it?