Now, if we followed the Creationist fantasy of what Scientists do everyone would now gather round and have a big back patting session about how we've proved the Bible is wrong again.
except you haven't proven the Bible wrong (ever). you cannot verify your results and no ancient record supports the modern science conclusion thus you are just trying to convince yourselves you are right when you are not and have no hope in proving you are.
It's a direct description of how Evolutionary science is described by the likes of Archaeologist. I have no pretence that you would say something so ridiculous.
Yes, I know what the paper was about. I was replying to Percy, not you. The paper tests the assumptions behind the calculation of the date, not the measurement of the rate.
Is typical strawman, and I'll hope you'll cut down on those if you want to discuss with me. Don't pretend to know how creationists think.
It's no strawman. It's a direct description of how Evolutionary science is described by the likes of Archaeologist. I have no pretence that you would say something so ridiculous.
you do not seem to understand my position at all. secular and evolutionary science is merely the blind leading the blind. you cannot prove your results and your excuse that 'science is not about the turth' undermines any claim you make about the past. if science is not about the truth then what it claims about origins and other unprovable conclusions is not true tus secular science destroys its own self appointed authority.
you just do not have a leg to stand upon.
Edited by Admin, : Add hide.
And, I assure you, dear boy, I've never said Science is not about truth. Because Science is most certainly and definitely about truth. What it cannot do is deliver sure and certain knowledge in the boring philosophical sense for Science is fundamentally a method. And back in the real world far from your fantasies of certainty, there is no method of knowing with sure and certain knowledge in that way that so excites first year philosophy students; as, indeed, any first year philosophy student can tell you.
But, dear boy, we can trust Science in a way we cannot trust anything else because Science is quite open in its methods; for but the price of a few magazine subscriptions or access to a good library one may determine the very methods by which the finest facts of Science have been determined. And, thus, we see the lie in your words. Nothing Science says in unsupported, it is in a myriad ways, tested, challenged and found secure.
Your 6000 years are a joke. Every facet of every living being screams that it is so. The very ground on which you walk tells a tale of countless millennia. But, dear boy, you need not take my word for it, for this is Science and you can find out and test it for your very self. The only thing you need dedicate is your time and energy to learning.
Sadly, of course, you'll first have to dedicate your time and energy to unlearning all the clueless drivel that currently fills your mind.
For the past few days I've been hiding the text in your messages that is either off-topic or unconstructive or is just bare assertions, but as I mentioned before, this is labor intensive. Beginning tomorrow I will issue 24-hour suspensions for violations like these.
The other method, however seems to be begging the question. They assume that chimps and humans had a common ancestor 6M years ago, then calculate the mutation rate and apply it to humans.
And since scientists aren't completely stupid, no-one has done that.
So long as they're getting the date of the chimp-human split from somewhere else, such as the fossil record, they are then entitled to use this date to calibrate the mutation rate of ape mtDNA and then use that to calculate the date of mitochondrial Eve.
A requirement is that the time to the most recent common ancestor(TMRCA) of the sample of lineages must already be known from other independent sources, usually the archeological record.
I understand what you mean, but as I said the circle is only truely completed when the 200k age given to Mit.-Eve is used as proof that the creationist position is wrong, since it is derived from assuming evolution occured, therefore, already assuming the creationist position to be wrong. This is where begging the question occurs.
Sorry it wasn't really explicit in the first place. It was badly formulated.
When you can provide evidence refuting the mountains of evidence for evolution, then you can propose this as begging the question. Evolution is not an assumption.
When you can provide evidence refuting the mountains of evidence for recent special creation, then you can propose this as begging the question.
See what I did there ?
To put it more explicitly. Evolution is an interpretation of the fossil record. The YEC position interprets the fossil record differently. Therefore, it is begging the question when you use evolutionnary presuppositions in order to derive an age, and then use this age as proof YEC is wrong, since you had already assumed it was wrong when you based your estimate on evolution.
AbE. If you can't see the fallacy here, you should review your understanding of what constitutes the fallacy of begging the question.
Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.
While I see your point, I would say that if I use a tape measure and measure a man to be six feet tall, and if a second person uses this fact to estimate that he takes size 12 shoes, and if a third person uses that estimate to argue that he can't fit inside a matchbox, this does not add up to circular reasoning. Though it is true that the third person would have made the situation clearer by referring to the original measurement rather than to the estimate derived from it.
This situation would not be altered if matchbox proponents claimed to have a different interpretation of measurements made with tape measures.
Evolution is an interpretation of the fossil record. The YEC position interprets the fossil record differently.
Some interpretations follow the data, while others, such as YEC, are absolutely contradicted by the data. To claim that each is a valid interpretation is complete nonsense. You should know better than to try to palm this off here.
Therefore, it is begging the question when you use evolutionnary presuppositions in order to derive an age, and then use this age as proof YEC is wrong, since you had already assumed it was wrong when you based your estimate on evolution.
Ages are derived from a wide variety of sources, from nuclear chemistry to stratigraphy, to geology, to archaeology, and more.
The fact is, all of the evidence points to an old earth. Your YEC belief has been contradicted and disproved time and time again. You can "interpret" the evidence all you want, but you can't hide from the facts, and the facts show the earth is old and that the YEC belief is wrong.
The YEC position interprets the fossil record differently. Therefore, it is begging the question when you use evolutionnary presuppositions in order to derive an age, and then use this age as proof YEC is wrong, since you had already assumed it was wrong when you based your estimate on evolution.
Apart from your errant use of the word assumed in the last sentence; yes, you're correct. Mitochondrial Eve does not provide additional evidence against a young earth* if the calculation of the date uses existing date measurements.
* - as if such a thing were needed.
I decided to have a look at the various papers containing estimates and see what methods they have chosen.
Cann et al2 estimated the rate by looking mtDNA divergence within clusters in New Guinea, Australia and the New World for which archaeological evidence evidence provides dates for the split. They compared these estimates to rates known from animal data to sanity check the rates.
So it's not the method you're concerned about, it's the answer. You accept that all offspring have mutations that make them different from their parents. And you accept that over many generations there's an average number of mutations per generation that can be used as a clock. And you accept that somewhere back in time there must have been common ancestors, one each on both the male and female lines.
But you reject any answer other than one somewhere roughly around 6000 years ago. And why might that be? Could it be because rather than looking at the evidence you're making an assumption of inerrancy about your interpretation of a story from a 2000 year old book written by desert nomads?
Of course, such an answer would be surprising in the extreme. It would require a great deal of research to explain how it fits with all the archeological evidence of human habitation much older than 6000 years, and with what we know of human migration rates and the fact that there was no land connection between Asia and the Americas after about 10,000 years ago. How could anyone who lived a mere 6000 years ago be a common ancestor of all modern people in both the old and new worlds?
Still, if the scientific answer is 6000 years ago then it must be accepted. So what is your argument for the validity of a date for Mit-Eve using Parsons value for the mitochondrial mutation rate?
More detailed research/ mtDNA mutation rate.
If I'm wrong about this last part then all you need do is explain why Parsons estimate of mitochondrial mutation rates should be used in making the calculation for Mit-Eve. If a properly scientific approach says that Mit-Eve lived just 6000 years ago then I'm sure that's fine by everyone here.
To help you and Slevesque with this discussion, here's a paper which is about research from a much larger number of transmission events than the Parsons paper Sleve brought up.
It mentions the Parsons paper, and includes Parsons' results along with their own and those from two other surveys in a final average (in the "discussion" section).
I haven't got time to do it now, but a few years ago I worked out from this data that the youngest possible age for the mtDNA Eve would be about 15,000 years.
For various reasons, she could be a lot older than that.
More detailed research on human mtDNA mutation rate.
Of course I can. Please provide an observation of special creation for me to refute.
There is no evidence for special creation, ether ancient or recent, and that is the problem you face.
Oviously, if I'm creationist it's a bit normal that I think the data better fits within a YEC interpretation than an evolutionary one.
This is a very large-scale claim that really adds nothing to this particular discussion. That is why we have multiple forums and threads to discuss each of these.
The one field that I do think that a long-age interpretation seems to be better as of 2010 is with the radiometric dating methods. This does not mean, however, that creationist ideas on this aren't available nor legitimate, nor that I would close my eyes on the other areas of study that I think support YEC quite well.
Fallacy of Reification. Facts do not point towards anything, nor do they show anything. Nor do they talk.
In science, facts are always interpreted by scientists. It is with the interpretation of a fact that I disagree with, never with the fact itself.