To clarify: 1-2% is an accurate measurement.
It is not based only on “measuring gene sequences.”
But there are mechanisms. Even if Michael Behe ‘me no wanna’ that they work. Nature does not really depend on his opinion, shocking though that news may be to his worshippers.
The ones doing anything other than lying all of the time might. Unfortunately for the creationists, that’s a privilege often reserved for those who happen happen to also have the evidentiary high ground.
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It is also not true that the Smithsonian is not explicit about how the measurements of genetic differences have been obtained (my emphasis):
While the genetic difference between individual humans today is minuscule – about 0.1%, on average – study of the same aspects of the chimpanzee genome indicates a difference of about 1.2%. The bonobo (Pan paniscus), which is the close cousin of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), differs from humans to the same degree. The DNA difference with gorillas, another of the African apes, is about 1.6%. Most importantly, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all show this same amount of difference from gorillas. A difference of 3.1% distinguishes us and the African apes from the Asian great ape, the orangutan. How do the monkeys stack up? All of the great apes and humans differ from rhesus monkeys, for example, by about 7% in their DNA.
Geneticists have come up with a variety of ways of calculating the percentages, which give different impressions about how similar chimpanzees and humans are. The 1.2% chimp-human distinction, for example, involves a measurement of only substitutions in the base building blocks of those genes that chimpanzees and humans share. A comparison of the entire genome, however, indicates that segments of DNA have also been deleted, duplicated over and over, or inserted from one part of the genome into another. When these differences are counted, there is an additional 4 to 5% distinction between the human and chimpanzee genomes.
No matter how the calculation is done, the big point still holds: humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are more closely related to one another than either is to gorillas or any other primate. From the perspective of this powerful test of biological kinship, humans are not only related to the great apes – we are one. The DNA evidence leaves us with one of the greatest surprises in biology: the wall between human, on the one hand, and ape or animal, on the other, has been breached. The human evolutionary tree is embedded within the great apes.
Genetics | The Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program
OK, Bill, your turn now: Kindly quote where Luskin has been similarly explicit in explaining that the difference between the 2% and 15% figures are due to differing measurement metrics, and not because the 2% figure has been superseded by new discoveries. You know, since you insist no one here has the moral high ground.
Over to you…
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Thank you for citing the Smithsonian clarifying their measurement.
I will look at Luskin’s assertions again.
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Hi Faizal
Here is an opening statement on Caseys paper.
A groundbreaking paper in Nature reports the “Complete sequencing of ape genomes,” including the genomes for chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, Bornean orangutans, Sumatran orangutans, and siamangs. I noted this in an article here yesterday, reporting that an evolutionary icon — the famous “1 percent difference” between the human and chimp genomes, touted across the breadth of popular and other scientific writing and teaching — has fallen. The researchers, for whatever reason — I’m not a mind reader — chose to bury that remarkable finding in technical jargon in their Supplementary Data section. Now for more on the scientific details.
You might be thinking, “Hey, weren’t these genomes sequenced long ago?” The answer is yes but also no. Yes, we had sequenced genomes from these species in the past, but, as the paper explains, “owing to the repetitive nature of ape genomes, complete assemblies have not been achieved. Current references lack sequence resolution of some of the most dynamic genomic regions, including regions corresponding to lineage-specific gene families.”
The spin is the 1% figure has fallen.
This does imply that the measurement difference is based on newer techniques and methods.
Look back at those numbers, “12.5–27.3%.” The same numbers show up again buried deep in the Supplemental Data where they compare various ape to human genomes.
The spin here is “buried deep” in the supplemental data inferring hiding data.
He does however provide a link to all the supplemental data.
In the chart below this he does include species to species divergence.
Deep in the Supplementary Data we find Figure III.12 which explains the gap divergence between different species
Again more here implying Nature is spinning the data. I agree he should not do this.
These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this?
Here he states the significance of the findings which I agree is over stated.
I suspect that this radical finding has implications — not just for science, but also for human exceptionalism, for the reliability of heavily marketed talking points, and more — that people will be discussing for a long time. And perhaps for some in the worlds of science and science reporting, especially those who touted the now discredited figure about a mere 1 percent difference from chimps, those conversations may not be welcome.
I agree there is selling type spin in his statements but to use the “lazy label” liar is not a good look.
Which of course is nonsense. It is entirely normal and expected, that some of, if not most of the data on which a scientific paper is based would be published in supplements, rather than displayed in its entirety in the article text[1]. The overall point is in the text, some figures and tables to support it, perhaps with a representative sample, or some statistically processed representation of the data, but not the entirety of the experiment. This is not dishonest, this is common practice, and the target audience – fellow researchers in the field, that is, or for a journal as general as Nature, perhaps, fellow scientists more broadly – are well aware of this. We are left, then, with two options:
- Luskin is not aware of what scientific publications even look like.
- Luskin is aware of how scientific publications are layed out, and is purposefully “spinning” it as shady, inviting his readers to distrust science in general, because undermining civilization for short-term political power is the entire point and purpose of the organization he works for.
In neither case do we have any reason to consider his criticisms, as he is either wholly unqualified to opine on matters of scientific practice, or being actively deceitful.
Depending on the experiment, sometimes it’s not feasible to include all of the relevant data even in the supplement, because, that, too, has some size limits. And that’s to say nothing of the clearly non-relevant data that the lab might have kept in case it should turn out important later down the line or upon referee query. ↩︎
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Thanks for your honest appraisal of Luskin’s conduct.
If someone knowingly says something that is false, he is lying. A person who lies is a liar. I don’t see anything controversial with that, but if you prefer to call lies “spin,” go ahead.
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Hi Faizal
To show someone is lying you have to prove intent. If you use the word spin then you do not have to prove intent.
All fine except that the word “genes” should be replaced by “sequences”, since the majority of assessed sequences are not genes (and most of the bits that are genes are introns, by the way).
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Wrong. Spinning is every bit as intentional as lying. That’s why spin doctors are paid so much.
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If you were accused of “spinning” a narrative, you would not think of it as someone pointing out an honest mistake, you’d think they are asserting your ill intentions, same as if they said you lied. Is it overly generous to assume that you understand this, and that you are sealioning again?
Also, a case can be made that someone who goes out of their way to make a big public statement, knowing the size and trust of their audience, should be responsible with their choice of words and expressions to not “spin” something clearly incorrectly. Could they make an honest mistake? Maybe. But figures with a large public profile ought expect more scrutiny, and more responsibility to try and not “spin” anything.
And while we are on the subject of honest mistakes, let’s keep in mind that honest people who do them and are publicly exposed over them tend to show some measure of remorse, retract their statement or issue a correction, and carry on more careful about the things they say in future. This is typically not what we see among creationist propagandists. Of course, only time will tell if and when Casey Luskin owns up to his “honest mistakes”, or whether he’ll wait decades to die and prove himself a liar.
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Hi Faizal
Almost everyone who makes an argument uses some level of spin either intentional or not. I cannot tell if Casey intended to deceive or not so I think it is mistake to accuse him of lying. Accusing him of lying is not a good look unless it is provable and obvious. Better have the detailed discussion and make your best counter argument as using “lazy labels” like liar makes your position look weaker.
If you are being honest here, you must consider Luskin to be a very stupid man.
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I think he needs work in representing Science and keeping his credibility. He is not alone with this issue on both sides.
Both sides of what? The genetic data documenting the differences between humans and chimpanzees is not a side.
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It’s provable and obvious that he intentionally altered that image.
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The fallacy that Bill is employing in his ‘everybody spins’ argument is that of False equivalence. Like all of his arguments, it is obviously fallacious.
I would suggest that there is little point in further belaboring the issue. Bill is incapable of learning from his mistakes. The sound of the ID echo chamber is too loud his ears, with all its pervasive dishonesty and misrepresentations, not-infrequent outright fabrications and its empty rhetoric. The chance that anything we say will stick against they gale of bullshit is slim to none.
The best that we can hope for is to minimise the degree that Bill inflicts his repetitive vacuous arguments and his streams of pointless sealioning on us.
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Hi Ron
If you read the paper that Luskin is talking about you will see in the abstract a line about minting genes by duplication. This is spin as they do not know the mechanism that generates new genes if one exists. This is also spin. I’m not saying it is an intentional effort to deceive but it is spin way beyond a simple discussion of sequence differences.
I don’t believe making statements that are true, but which some people refuse to accept because of their religious zealotry, counts as “spin.”
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I agree but this does not follow in the case I cited.