Portrait of a pseudoscientist
One of the landmark legal decisions in the history of American science education is Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 Supreme Court decision that ruled that creationism could not be taught in the classroom because it had the specific intent of introducing a narrowly sectarian religious view, which violated the separation of church and state. This is obviously true: creationism, as advanced by major Christian organizations like AiG or ICR is simply an extravagant exaggeration of the book of Genesis from the Christian Bible.
Ken Ham dreams of overturning Edwards v. Aguillard, and now he thinks he has a way.
These findings mark a monumental change in the origins debate. In the 1980s, the federal courts and the Supreme Court declared the teaching of creation science in the public schools to be invalid.7 According to the courts, creationists didn’t do science; therefore, creation science could not be taught in the science classroom. Jeanson’s new paper represents a bona fide scientific discovery, nullifying the legal basis for this 40-year-old practice.
The “findings” he is touting are from a paper by Nathaniel Jeanson, “Y-Chromosome-Guided Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA: New Evidence for a Mitochondrial DNA Root and Clock, and for at Least One Migration from Asia into the Americas in the First Millennium BC“, published in the Answers Research Journal (not a valid peer-reviewed scientific journal), which Ham thinks “proves” that creationism is scientific. Surprise, it doesn’t. Even if Jeanson’s research were valid, it is irrelevant to the whole creationism vs. evolution argument — Ham summarizes the results of the paper.
New research published today in the Answers Research Journal solves this mystery and extends our understanding of the pre-Columbian period back to the beginning of the Mayan era. Through a study of the female-inherited mitochondrial DNA, creationist biologist Nathaniel Jeanson uncovered evidence for two more migrations prior to the AD 300s. In the 100s BC, right around the time that Teotihuacan began to rise, a group of northeast Asians landed in the Americas. In the 1000s BC, right around the time that the Maya began to flourish in the Guatemalan lowlands, another group of northeast Asians arrived in the Americas./p>
What does that have to do with Genesis?
Again, Edwards v Aguillard says nothing about specific scientific research; it rejected the teaching of creationism because it was specifically intended to advance a particular religion, not that creationists are incapable of using the tools of science. It does not help their case that their research is secular when it’s published in an in-house journal dedicated to to the technical development of the Creation and Flood model of origins
, written by an author who is an employee of AiG, which specifically requires that he signed a statement of faith, which states that Scripture teaches a recent origin of man and the whole creation, with history spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ
and that 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
.
So even if Jeanson were doing good science within those constraints, the paper would not demonstrate secular intent. Even worse, though, Jeanson does not do good science. He’s a hack trying to force the molecular data to conform to the timeline of Genesis. Here’s an excerpt from Dan Stern Cardinale’s (a real population geneticist) review of Jeanson’s book, Traced. Jeanson doesn’t understand the basic science — he can’t, because it would undermine his entire faith-based premise.
There are, uh, significant problems with the case Jeanson makes.
The first, which underlies much of his analysis, is that he treats genealogy and phylogeny as interchangeable.
They are not interchangeable. Genealogy is the history of individuals and familial relationships. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of groups: populations, species, etc. A phylogenetic tree may superficially look like a family tree, but all those lines and branch points represent populations, not individuals. This is an extremely basic error.
There are additional problems with each step of the case he makes.
In terms of calculating the Y-TMRCA, it’s nothing new: He uses single-generation pedigree-based mutation rates rather than long-term substitution rates. It’s the same error that invalidates his work calculating a 6000kya mitochondrial TMRCA. He even references a couple of studies that indicate the consensus date of 200-300kya for the Y-MRCA, but dismisses them as low-quality (he ignores that there are many, many more such studies).
He is constrained in an extremely narrow timespan for much of the Y-chromosome branching due to its occurrence after the flood (~4500 years ago) and running up against well-documented, recorded human history (he ignores that Egyptian history spans the Flood). So he has to squeeze a ton of human history into half a millennium, at most.
Nathaniel Jeanson isn’t going to be the secular savior of creationism. Ken Ham’s dream of overthrowing the tyranny of a Supreme Court decision is not going to be fulfilled by an incompetent hack writing bad papers. He should still have some hope, though, because the current Roberts court is hopelessly corrupt and partisan, packed with religious ideologues who are happy to overthrow precedent if it helps the far right cause. The crap pumped out by the Answers Research Journal isn’t going to help him because real scientists can see right through the pretense, but that the current administration is on a crusade to drive scientists out of the country might.
P.S. Jeanson has been scurrying about trying to find support for creationism by abusing Native American genetics, but you’re better off reading Jennifer Raff’s Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas for the real story.
QFT.
The worldwide Genocide Flood happened during the Egyptian Third Dynasty.
At that time, the Egyptians were building the pyramids.
After the Flood happened, they just kept on building pyramids, not realizing that a great flood had happened and that they were, in fact, dead.
We also have living trees and bushes that are older than the YEC universe.
There are many such examples.
This plant clone is a species that now consists of one plant that vegetatively propagates itself.
The universe is 13.79 billion years old. We know this through the Hubble constant and cosmic expansion and cosmic microwave background. It’s interesting that the YEC crowd never talks about this.
Interesting. That isn’t when the Tower of Babel incident allegedly happened. It sounds like Jeanson is chasing that LDS Church grant money by trying to bolster Book of Mormon claims.
They’re right-wing hacks, but they’re mostly Catholic right-wing hacks. Catholics, even U.S. ones, are not into the YEC cult — they call it superstition.
(Somehow I failed to mention I was talking about SCOTUS in my prior post.)
Tiny correction/question on the Cardinale quote:
“It’s the same error that invalidates his work calculating a 6000kya mitochondrial TMRCA. He even references a couple of studies that indicate the consensus date of 200-300kya for the Y-MRCA, but dismisses them as low-quality (he ignores that there are many, many more such studies).”
I assume he means ‘6000ya’ (years ago) for the creationists rather than 6000kya (6 million years ago). It’s an easy error, because the real scientists in this field are always working in those large spans of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, so the unit just slips off the tongue/keyboard. The creationists trying to fit human history into a box 2-3 orders of magnitude too small (and geology into one 6 or so orders too small) is a source of a huge number of their misconceptions/errors/delusions.
bravus, creationism is a big tent. Old-earth creationists, young-earth creationists, all are creationists.
Obs, this is mocking YECers, but they’re only a subset.
Oh certainly. I’m a science educator who grew up in that tent but has since moved out. Heck, I even have a heuristic for trying to identify ‘who’s who at the zoo’ between young and old earth creationists (and the latter divides into old-universe, old-Earth and old-life), theistic evolutionists and the whole shebang, and what assumptions underlie each position. I should probably have been more specific and used the word ‘YEC’ rather than ‘creationists’ in my final sentence.
@2, John Watts
god’s days are 1.97 billion earth years, so we are at the end of his 7th day of creation. he is probably busy getting ready for bed, which explains why he hasn’t spoken to us since Moses. creating a universe requires a good nights sleep, or you make mistakes, like the platypus.
Well put, bravus. Ta.
What was the point they were trying to make? I don’t see how proving (whether they did or not) that there were later migrations after the Maya says anything about the age of the earth. Since the Americas have been populated by various groups and empires for over 17,000 years, unless you can prove that’s wrong somehow, a 6,000 year old earth is right out. And even if their paper did show what they claim, how does that prove that creationism is science, since the paper doesn’t sound like it speaks to or for creationism at all, except for where it was published.
So what if more people came here after the people who were already here? What’s that got to do with proving creationism?