If you follow my blog regularly, you probably will have noticed that I haven’t been writing as many posts on Answers in Genesis and young earth creationism as I did last fall. The reason for that is because last fall my big “project” was writing my book, The Heresy of Ham. I’ve been able to finish that up, and am now looking for publishers. Consequently, I’m not reading up as much on AiG as I was last fall, and hence, I’m not writing as much on AiG either.
That being said, I still peruse Ken Ham’s Twitterfeed and blog, just to see if there is anything interesting to comment on. Well, about a week ago, Ken Ham blogged about a “peer-reviewed” academic paper that Jason Lisle and Nathanial Jeanson wrote, entitled, On the Origin of Eukaryotic Species’ Genotypic and Phenotypic Diversity. The paper attempts to argue that yes, it is scientifically possible for the original “1,000 kinds” that came out of Noah’s ark 4365 years ago to branch out into the current millions of species we have today.
This naturally piqued my interest, because I had written about this issue before. I have pointed out that the kind of variation AiG is claiming to have happened is just flat out impossible: the equivalent of two original beagles procreating so much, so fast, with so much genetic variation, that it would require the emergence of a brand new species…of wolf, Siberian huskie, poodle, coyote, etc. etc….every seven years up to the present day.
(Joel Duff, the “Natural Historian” has written about this extensively as well. In this post, “Testing YEC Hyper-Evolution from Common Ancestors,” he addresses this very thing. He has written numerous other posts in the same vein.)
In a word…AiG’s claims are impossible.
And so, when I saw that Jeanson and Lisle had written an academic paper that apparently proves it is possible, I had to read it. Granted, I’m not a scientist, and so I fully expected some of the jargon to be hard to grasp, but overall I thought if they were to make a case, it should be understandable.
Boy, was I wrong.
Some Preliminary Observations
Before I get into the paper itself, though, a few preliminary things need to be pointed out that should be the cause of some suspicion and concern to begin with.
First, there is Ken Ham’s claim that this was a “peer-reviewed” paper. For those of you who might not be in the realm of academia to know what that means, it is basically this: if you write a “peer-reviewed” paper, that means you have submitted your paper to the analysis and critique of your peers in your given field of expertise. The fact that you’re willing to put your ideas out there for professional critique lends your paper credibility. Therefore, when Ham promotes this paper as being “peer-reviewed,” it gives the impression that it has a certain amount of credibility.
The only problem is that when Ken Ham says, “peer-reviewed,” it means something a bit different. In the case of this paper, it was not reviewed by “peers” in the field of biology or genetics. It was reviewed by Jeanson and Lisle’s “peers” at Answers in Genesis and The Institute for Creation Research. How do we know this? Because at the end of the paper, they thank the specific people who reviewed it and suggested improvements. Simply put, it really isn’t “peer-reviewed” when the only people who critique it are people with whom you already agree.
Secondly, given the fact that this paper was going to focus on genetics and genetic mutation, you would assume that Jeanson and/or Lisle’s area of expertise was genetics. As it turns out, Jeanson’s field is that of cell biology, but Lisle is an astrophysicist. I really don’t know if that qualifies Lisle in this area.
Now For Some Specifics on the Lack of Clarity (Lessons in Obsfucation!)
Now I’m not going to be able to comment on everything in the paper…it was a tad too long. And when I say a “tad,” I mean it was, once I copied and pasted it on a word document, 51 single-spaced pages long—26,000 words. And not only was it insanely long, it was (I just have to assume this) intentionally unintelligible. Granted, given the fact it was a scientific paper on genetics, I didn’t expect to understand everything in it, but I was an English major, and I taught English for eight years—one of the fundamental things to know is that the key to good writing is the ability to state things in a clear manner. In other words, to be understandable.
Now, it is true that academic journals in all fields are filled with articles by scholars that, to be kind, are not exactly the clearest or most well-written examples of good writing out there. But this paper was something of which I had never seen. I will provide just one example. Consider the following paragraph from the paper:
In Drosophila, nuclear SNV analyses were performed only on D. melanogaster and D. simulans. Therefore, we used their mtDNA NCBI accession numbers (same as those in the previously published Drosophila mtDNA analyses [Jeanson 2015a]) to obtain their whole mtDNA genome sequences from NCBI Nucleotide (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore), and these sequences were aligned with CLUSTALX 2.1 (http://www.clustal.org/clustal2/). The resultant alignment file was imported into BioEdit (http://www.mbio.ncsu.edu/bioedit/bioedit.html), and all non-standard nucleotide sequences (e.g., N, M, R, Y, B, W, S, V, H, D) were replaced with gaps. Then all gaps were stripped from the alignment. BioEdit was then used to create a sequence difference count matrix, which identified 634 mtDNA differences between the two species. This number was compared to the mtDNA SNV mutation rate predictions published previously (Jeanson 2015a).
Note…
I didn’t do the exact figuring, but I would have to say that a good 75% of the paper read exactly like this. Read this one paragraph over and over again, for about 100 times, and you’ll get a feel for what reading the paper was like.
Granted, I’m not an expert in the field of science—if you are, please leave a comment and say, “Yes Joel, that’s standard scientific writing, and you’re just ignorant of it.” I will gladly profess my ignorance, but when I read a 51-page paper in which there are loads of scientific terms that are just “thrown out there” with absolutely no attempt to explain what they mean, and then the writing goes on for the vast majority of the paper as I have shown above, I get the distinct impression that the paper isn’t so much an attempt to clearly explain the young earth creationist position and argument, as it is an attempt to obfuscate so much as to say, “Just trust us…even though you might not understand what we’re writing, all this “scientificy” should tell you that we’re really smart…so just trust us, we’re right!”
By contrast, read any of the scientific posts written by Joel Duff on his blog, you will see a vast difference. Even with some of his more difficult posts, you will be able to understand a lot more, because he’s actually writing with the purpose of communicating clearly. I can’t say the same thing for Jeanson and Lisle.
In addition, another thing I noticed (as can be seen in the above example), is the vast majority of citations Jeanson and Lisle make are to their own work. Again, the purpose of an academic paper is to make your case, but to also show that you’ve read up on the research of others enough so that people can take you seriously. But if the most cited guy in your academic paper is yourself, then you’ve just shown one thing: you haven’t interacted with the research—you’re just coming up with things on your own.
And then there were the charts…lots and lots of charts—I think I counted upwards of 35. I honestly cannot tell you what they mean (again, I fully admit to my scientific ignorance). All I was able to ascertain was that Jeanson and Lisle had supposed predicted the number of “SNV differences” in various things, and found out that there were actually many more than they had originally predicted. What are “SNV differences”? Well, I had to google it! A “Nuclear SNV” stands for “single nucleotide variant,” and that have something to do with mitochondrial DNA.
Why Such Obfuscation?
I think I figured out what their point was by the end of the paper, but I’ll get to that in a bit. For now, I just want to make clear that as former English teacher, this paper made my head spin. No one could write in such an obfuscating manner accidentally. I had to conclude that the purpose of the paper was to “sound scientificy” enough to dumb-found and bedazzle typical AiG readers, so that their reaction would be, “Wow! That sounds really detailed! It must be true!”
In any case, that was just the tip of the iceberg. The real shockers come next…in tomorrow’s post.
Looking forward to part II. I have only taken a cursory look at that article. I will need to dig into it deeper at some point but I can tell you that it looks like Jeanson is using the same erroneous assumptions about mutation rates that he has been criticized for many times already. Regarding peer-review, the problem at AiG is that Jeason has no peers since no one else knows enough about what he is writing about to be able to review his work. Even his co-author is unlikely to have been able to provide any critical feedback.