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News

30% of gorilla genome contradicts Darwinian prediction of human and ape phylogeny

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The latest episode of ID the Future discusses a recent (March 2012) paper about the gorilla genome.

Details:

On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin discusses how the recent complete sequencing of the gorilla genome has challenged conventional thinking about human ancestry and explains what neo-Darwinists are doing to try to minimize the impact of this new information. Says Luskin: “There is not a clear signal of ancestral relationships that is coming out of the gorilla genome once you add it into the mix.” Tune in to hear about this interesting development!

The MP3 file is here.

Rather than summarize this short 10-minute podcast, I wanted to excerpt a post of Evolution News about it.

Excerpt: (links removed)

A whopping 30% of the gorilla genome — amounting to hundreds of millions of base pairs of gorilla DNA — contradicts the standard supposed evolutionary phylogeny of great apes and humans. That’s the big news revealed last week with the publication of the sequence of the full gorilla genome. But there’s a lot more to this story.

Eugenie Scott once taught us that when some evolutionary scientist claims some discovery “sheds light” on some aspect of evolution, we might suspect that’s evolution-speak for ‘this find really messed up our evolutionary theory.’ That seems to be the case here. Aylwyn Scally, the lead author of the gorilla genome report, was quoted saying, “The gorilla genome is important because it sheds light on the time when our ancestors diverged from our closest evolutionary cousins around six to 10 million years ago.” NPR titled its story similarly: “Gorilla Genome Sheds Light On Human Evolution.” What evolutionary hypothesis did the gorilla genome mess up?

The standard evolutionary phylogeny of primates holds that humans and chimps are more closely related to one-another than to other great apes like gorillas. In practice, all that really means is that when we sequence human, chimp, and gorilla genes, human and chimp genes have a DNA sequence that is more similar to one-another’s genes than to the gorilla’s genes. But huge portions of the gorilla genome contradict that nice, neat tidy phylogeny. That’s because these gorilla genes are more similar to the human or chimp version than the human or chimp versions are to one-another. In fact, it seems that some 30% of the gorilla genome contradicts the standard primate phylogeny in this manner.

The Evolution News post then cites New Scientist and Nature’s comments on the study.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a study like this – the last time was about the chimpanzee genome and the paper was published in Nature – the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal.

Podcasts

Physicist Frank Tipler on the usefulness of refereed journals, then and now

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I really enjoyed this episode of the ID the Future podcast.

Description:

Is the only good science peer-reviewed science? Are there other avenues to present important scientific work? On this episode of ID The Future, Professor of Mathematics Dr. Frank Tipler discusses the pros and cons of peer review and refereed journals. More than fifty peer-reviewed papers discussing intelligent design have been published, but critics of the theory still proclaim a lack of peer-reviewed work as an argument. Listen in as Tipler shows how things have changed with the peer review process and what we can do about it.

About the speaker:

Frank Tipler was born and raised in Andalusia, Alabama. His first science project was a letter written in kindergarten to Werner von Braun, whose plans to launch the first earth satellite were then being publicized. Von Braun’s secretary replied, regretting he had no rocket fuel for Tipler as requested. By age five, he knew he wanted to be an astrophysicist. But he’s always been a polymath, reading widely across disciplines and into the history of science and theology. After graduating from MIT and the University of Maryland, he did postdoctoral work at Oxford and Berkeley, before arriving at Tulane in 1981.

Whenever William Lance Craig often cites a book by two physicists named “Barrow and Tipler” called “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle” (Oxford University Press, 1988) in his debates to support the fine-tuning argument.  This Tipler is that Tipler! Dr. Tipler is a master of the physics of cosmology and fine-tuning. However, I definitely disagree with him on some of his ideas.

The MP3 file is here. (17 minutes)

Topics:

  • the changing nature of refereed journals and peer-review
  • previously, the refereed journals were more about communication
  • now, ideas are not taken seriously unless they are published in these journals
  • the problem is that referees can be motivated by ideological concerns
  • before, an obscure patent official named Einstein submitted a physics paper and it was published
  • now, an uncredited person would not be able to have a brilliant paper published like that
  • today, there are so many scientists that many more papers are submitted
  • although it restricts BAD ideas, it can also end up censoring NEW ideas
  • the problem is that any really brilliant idea has to go against the prevailing consensus
  • peer-review may actually be holding back the progress of science by censoring NEW ideas
  • some referees are motivated to censor ideas that undercut their reputation and prestige
  • Dr. Tipler was told to remove references to intelligent design before one of his papers would be published
  • how scientists with NEW ideas can bypass the system of refereed journals when they are censored
  • peer-review has value when it finds errors, but not when it suppresses new ideas

I think this one is a must listen. As much as I like peer-reviewed research, it’s important to acknowledge the limitations. I think if you’re going into a debate, you definitely want to be the one with the peer-reviewed evidence. Let the other guy be the one making assertions and stating his preferences and opinions. But that doesn’t mean that the peer-review process can’t be improved – I think that it can be improved.

Here is a listing of some recent peer-reviewed publications related to intelligent design.

Podcasts

The Talk Origins speciation FAQ and the problem of citation-bluffing

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The thing to be explained by Darwinism (in addition to the origin of life) is how can you get new, different body plans and organ types by the mechanisms of mutation and selection. Everyone admits that you can get cases where animal A mutates in a small way so that it can no longer breed with animal B. That is speciation of a sort, because the animals can no longer breed. But the real question is whether we can generate species with different body plans using these naturalistic Darwinian mechanisms of mutation and selection.

Here are two podcasts featuring Casey Luskin that discuss how much morphological change has really been observed according to research.

Here is the MP3 file from part one. (14 minutes)

Details:

On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin discusses Talk Origins, a resource often used by supporters of Darwinian evolution to refute arguments made by proponents of intelligent design. After taking a closer look, Luskin found FAQs on Talk Origins guilty of citation bluffing, overstated claims, and other misleading tactics. In particular, the Talk Origins FAQ on speciation claims to provide evidence of “observed instances” of new species. On further review, this turns out to be far from the case. Tune in to Luskin as he explains why.

Here is the MP3 file from part two. (21 minutes)

Details:

On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin continues his discussion about Talk Origins, a resource often used by supporters of Darwinian evolution to refute arguments made by proponents of intelligent design. After taking a closer look, Luskin found FAQs onTalk Origins guilty of citation bluffing, overstated claims, and other misleading tactics. In particular, the Talk Origins FAQ on speciation claims to provide evidence of “observed instances” of new species. On further review, this turns out to be far from the case. Tune in to Luskin as he explains why in this conclusion to a two-part series.

Basically, he takes a look at the details of cases of “speciation” claimed in the Talk Origins FAQ, and finds that the changes are minor changes, and not changes in morphology. This is not the change that we are looking for to support the hypothesis of macro-evolution. In order to become Darwinists, we need to observe change driven by mutations that leads to changes in body plans. And the mutations have to be heritable.

Highly recommended. You’ve got to love the directness of Casey Luskin explaining what needs to be proved and what has been proved. By the way, here is a more detailed written assessment of speciation claims of the Darwinists.