Discussion about scientific issues as they relate to God and Christianity including archaeology, origins of life, the universe, intelligent design, evolution, etc.
In the past six years, more-direct measurements using ‘next-generation’ DNA sequencing have come up with quite different estimates. A number of studies have compared entire genomes of parents and their children — and calculated a mutation rate that consistently comes to about half that of the last-common-ancestor method.
A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution, such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world1. But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between.
Last year, population geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues compared the genome of a 45,000-year-old human from Siberia with genomes of modern humans and came up with the lower mutation rate2. Yet just before the Leipzig meeting, which Reich co-organized with Kay Prüfer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, his team published a preprint article3 that calculated an intermediate mutation rate by looking at differences between paired stretches of chromosomes in modern individuals (which, like two separate individuals’ DNA, must ultimately trace back to a common ancestor). Reich is at a loss to explain the discrepancy. “The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us,” he says. “It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite embarrassingly bad and uncertain.”
SoCalExile wrote:The fact that they are essentially making up numbers to fit their assumptions is an embarrassment to the idea of science.
Yes , but like I said many times before many of the young atheists and naturalists on this forum and other forums don't think that these scientists will ever stoop so low as to bring their worldview into their interpretations of the data and as this link shows they do that on a regular basis .
Just look at neuroscientist who still believe that there is no reason to believe that Nde's aren't caused by the brain. This isn't real science
There's been an on-going debate Genesis creation vs. evolutionary thought for years and will probably continue -- scientists who will do most Anything to maintain their professional standing -- regarding how man got here / how long he's been here. Genetics is a fascinating subject. And when evidence begins to lean in a direction they don't like -- it's the 'we need more time to study and there will always be areas we don't have answers for' When in reality we Do have God's Word With the answers -- 'we' simply don't like to accept that. It's usually too 'something' to be taken too literally or too 'whatever'.
I'm no scholar -- just someone who's done a lot of researching on my own. Adding my two cents worth.
