Testing Jeanson's Model: Y Chromosome Mutation Rates

[thoughtful (Valerie (non-scientist))]

@swamidass

@thoughtful

So, he is lying when he says there are only two studies?

I would not call this lying. He is writing about a topic way outside his expertise and may not realize how wrong he is. I would say that this is a totally false claim, whether Nathaniel realizes it or not.

As it is, you can see for yourself though, he does not meantion this study (and many others like it):

@swamidass

So, back in 2015, this blog post covered one of the higher quality papers that directly measures mutation rate.

http://massgenomics.org/2015/07/insights-human-de-novo-mutations.html

This is one of my favorite papers ever.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3292

I do think it is interesting that he acknowledges that “Both studies have reported results to be consistent with the evolutionary timescale.” However, as I already explained, the way he computes the mutation rates is not valid.

Is this lying? Is it incompetence? Is it loyalty to the AIG belief statement? Something else or some mix of all these? No one can know for sure but Nathaniel. So I don’t want to call it lying.

OK - I’m a little slow to understanding what you meant and what he’s referring to. He is referring to just the Y-chromosome mutations and you say he’s ignoring the whole genome, which fits with what you said. The links you provide are sequencing the entire genome.

However, for what he’s saying, do we need the entire genome? Why run into all these complicated mathematical problems when we know Y chromosome is inherited from a father who passes it down to his son and so on? Wouldn’t that yield a more accurate pedigree rate for each generation of males rather than sequencing the entire genome?