Y-Chromosome Study 'Confirms' Genesis (?)

[EverythingForever]

My Sister, a YEC fundamentalist Christian, recently linked me to this article.  She 'wants to know my thoughts on it' (ie., she is trying to witness to me). 

https://www.icr.org/article/y-chromosome...-timeline/

My understanding of evolution (and subsequent atheistic arguments) are more broad and unfocused as compared to something as specific and focused as 'Y-chromosome studies'.  My understanding is that creationists will try anything and everything to purport that the Earth is only 6.5 to 10k years old.  ...because if they can win on these grounds, they have a 'powerful argument' for the existence of a monotheistic deity (confirmation of the 'history' of the Bible).

Nevermind the oddity of the enormous size of the cosmos (and the notion that life, likely, exists elsewhere in it), nevermind that there are multiple religions to choose from on Planet Earth, nevermind the mounds and mounds of evidence for evolution (geological, biological, etc), nevermind the many issues that arise from accepting that 'God' created and allowed suffering and pain -- essentially, nevermind tons and tons of evidence against the notion that we are descendants from the 'sons and daughters' of Noah. 

Essentially, I don't suspect anything significant of this creationist article, but my skillset does not allow me to accurately answer her specifically in this case.  Wish I knew more.

Can someone educate me on this and/or point me in the right direction towards answering her? 

Thank you. 


Incidentally, I tried searching on YouTube for some atheist reflections on this topic, but only found more creationist stuff:

[Minimalist]

The ICR is a bunch of batshit crazy motherfuckers.  Think of Drippy on steroids.

[brewerb]

Evolution and the bible have nothing to do with each other. It's only desperate believers that drag evolution into the conversation.

[Bucky Ball]

My Sister, a YEC fundamentalist Christian, recently linked me to this article.  She 'wants to know my thoughts on it' (ie., she is trying to witness to me). 

This is where it's published. https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/..._clock.pdf
It's the ONLY place it's published. There is no peer review. So it can be dismissed.

1. We know the Noah myth never happened. There are a number of ways to prove that. 
2. See re the Genetic Bottleneck. We know mutation rates. We see what genetic diversity is NOW. 
We know you can't get from there to here in the small amount of time since (a) flood. 
If there were a genetic study that threatened evolution, it would be world-wide news, and someone would have a Nobel.
It's desperation by Creationists to validate their debunked world-view.

[Bucky Ball]

duplicate

[Dancefortwo]

The oldest known man made structure in the world is the Carin of Barnenez, dating to 4800 BCE.  The pottery surrounding the building was left intact which indicates there was no flood as a flood would have carried the pottery away.  A flood would have carried the building away too.    Ice core samples going back 40 thousand years show there was no flood.  It's always interesting that YEC try to use a little slice of science with no understanding of what they're reading to prove their myth stories but ignore the rest of science that prove otherwise.  There is literally more evidence for the theory of evolution than the theory of gravity. 

Twenty years ago or so anthropologists invited a group of Evangelicals to look at a large table full of about 20 or 25 skulls dating from the earliest ape/human and progressing seamlessly to a modern human skull. The anthropologists  asked them to identify the first human skull in the group.  The Evangelicals couldn't do it.  The early skulls they recognized as ape but they could not pick out a point where humans began.  I wish I could find the paper on this little study.  It demonstrated visually how real evolution is.   But I'd bet none of the Evangelicals were convinced even though it was staring at them right in the face.

[Minimalist]

Here's an example of creatard "scientists."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Baugh

Just a bunch of phonies and con men.....like Dripshit except he's probably a barefoot hillbilly because he can't make bullshit pay.

[Bucky Ball]

So, I'll have to ask a real expert in this field when I see one at work, but it looks like the "study" is nothing new. The known mutation rates in the Y chromosome is already known to be different from other chromosomes.

"As it has been already mentioned, the Y chromosome is unable to recombine during meiosis like the other human chromosomes; however, in 2003, researchers from MIT discovered a process which may slow down the process of degradation. They found that human Y chromosome is able to "recombine" with itself, using palindrome base pair sequences.[30] Such a "recombination" is called gene conversion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_chromosome
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ge/603013/
The people involved in this little circle-jerk, (Tompkins and his buddy at IRC who authored the study) are well known in asserting the accepted time-line is wrong. (They have no Nobel .... haha).

Y is also being lost : (well known) : Degeneration .... that alone could account for what the study claims it found.
"By one estimate, the human Y chromosome has lost 1,393 of its 1,438 original genes over the course of its existence, and linear extrapolation of this 1,393-gene loss over 300 million years gives a rate of genetic loss of 4.6 genes per million years.[21] Continued loss of genes at the rate of 4.6 genes per million years would result in a Y chromosome with no functional genes – that is the Y chromosome would lose complete function – within the next 10 million years, or half that time with the current age estimate of 160 million years.[13][22] Comparative genomic analysis reveals that many mammalian species are experiencing a similar loss of function in their heterozygous sex chromosome. Degeneration may simply be the fate of all non-recombining sex chromosomes, due to three common evolutionary forces: high mutation rate, inefficient selection, and genetic drift."

"However, comparisons of the human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes (first published in 2005) show that the human Y chromosome has not lost any genes since the divergence of humans and chimpanzees between 6–7 million years ago,[23] and a scientific report in 2012 stated that only one gene had been lost since humans diverged from the rhesus macaque 25 million years ago.[24] These facts provide direct evidence that the linear extrapolation model is flawed and suggest that the current human Y chromosome is either no longer shrinking or is shrinking at a much slower rate than the 4.6 genes per million years estimated by the linear extrapolation model."

[grympy]

My Sister, a YEC fundamentalist Christian, recently linked me to this article.  She 'wants to know my thoughts on it' (ie., she is trying to witness to me). 

This is where it's published. https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/..._clock.pdf
It's the ONLY place it's published. There is no peer review. So it can be dismissed.

1. We know the Noah myth never happened. There are a number of ways to prove that. 
2. See re the Genetic Bottleneck. We know mutation rates. We see what genetic diversity is NOW. 
We know you can't get from there to here in the small amount of time since (a) flood. 
If there were a genetic study that threatened evolution, it would be world-wide news, and someone would have a Nobel.
It's desperation by Creationists to validate their debunked world-view.

 

Too complex for me
 
What about: if there had been a  universal flood, the ocean (there's  really only one)  would have become  desalinated and all sea life would have died.

Or play the Aussie card;  In Noah's  flood, where are all the cute and unique Australian animals and  birds? Why is not the kangaroo, for example mentioned?  

[brewerb]

Apparently Y chromosomes don't evolve the same as other genes. The people at "answers in genesis" are comparing apples and oranges when they talk about the "mutation rate".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...608736.pdf

But I doubt you sister can understand the attached.

Edit: Bucky essentially ninj'd.

[Chas]

Too complex for me
 
What about: if there had been a  universal flood, the ocean (there's  really only one)  would have become  desalinated and all sea life would have died.

Or play the Aussie card;  In Noah's  flood, where are all the cute and unique Australian animals and  birds? Why is not the kangaroo, for example mentioned?  

Oh you silly boy; ancient aliens brought the kangaroos, wallabies,  and the rest after The Flood. 

[Minimalist]

I'm sure Dripshit will pull some ridiculous excuse out of his ass for this.

[Paleophyte]

Can someone educate me on this and/or point me in the right direction towards answering her?

 - That isn't a scientific paper. It's a webpage from the ICR, an organization with a clear and obvious bias. This is actually slightly less reliable than a blog by Novartis on Why You Should Eat More Ritalin. The author works for the ICR, publishes at the ICR, and cites exclusively ICR publications. That's about as academically incestuous as it gets. There is zero external input into this.


 - The Y chromosome is a weirdo. Don't trust mutation rates on it. It's a tiny little thing because it's really just a fragment of an X chromosome that doesn't do much except say "Thou Shalt Be Male!" It doesn't undergo meiosis the way other chromosomes do, so it has different mutation rates.

- "Y chromosome Adam" and "Mitochondrial Eve" lived tens of thousands of years apart and don't represent actual people. There is no genetic bottleneck. It's just a statistical artifact. All that's happening here is that you're tracing back your paternal line using the Y chromosome. If you run any set of lineages long enough then individuals eventually either become ancestors to all of us or none of us. That's all that you're seeing here. If you could trace back your ancestry along a different lineage then you'd arrive at a different common ancestor. And that's precisely why you get a very different ancestor when you use the mitochondrial DNA to trace back your maternal lineage.

You might want to ask your sister "Why the flood?" Aside from the sheer physical impossibility it has some very serious theological problems. The "god" of the flood doesn't have the wits to painlessly pop a bunch of sinners into nothingness but leaves the water running instead and kills all life on Earth as a "side-effect". This makes him look like the sort of imbecile who couldn't get it right and then threw a hissy fit that drowned a lot of innocent puppies and kittens (and unicorns?) trying (and failing, yet again!) to fix it.

[Minimalist]

This makes him look like the sort of imbecile

Well, that is his target audience.  Just look at Dripshit.

[grympy]

Too complex for me
 
What about: if there had been a  universal flood, the ocean (there's  really only one)  would have become  desalinated and all sea life would have died.

Or play the Aussie card;  In Noah's  flood, where are all the cute and unique Australian animals and  birds? Why is not the kangaroo, for example mentioned?  

Oh you silly boy; ancient aliens brought the kangaroos, wallabies,  and the rest after The Flood. 

 Oh (snaps  finger)   OF course. Silly old me.

What can I say, I'm old and easily confused 

[Aractus]

Can someone educate me on this and/or point me in the right direction towards answering her? 

There is Y-Chromosomal Adam, though he's much much older than a 6,000 year old biblical Adam. Also, there are DNA bottlenecks (more than one) but they don't confirm a flood, they simply confirm the human race survived from a very small population at some points in the past. Again the bottlenecking in no way agrees with a 6,000 year old Earth, or for that matter the survival of a single family. Also none of them, to my knowledge anyway, were completely "global". The one I linked to for example, DNA bottlenecking 70,000 years ago, there are populations outside of it that have DNA untouched by the bottleneck such as Aboriginals here in Australia.

[Phaedrus]

All you really need to know about creation science is that it's simply not science. Therefore, all creation science claims can be ignored.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Reason #2: ICR feels justified in lying because they're lying for Jesus. If it makes emotional sense to them then it's good to go for publication.

Reason #1: AND as long as they produce this tripe on a regular basis their funding won't dry up.

[SYZ]

My Sister, a YEC fundamentalist Christian, recently linked me to this article.  She 'wants to know my thoughts on it' (ie., she is trying to witness to me). 

[snip]

Can someone educate me on this and/or point me in the right direction towards answering her? 

There's really no point in wasting your time trying to respond to her by using science or logic.
And just because she's raised the issue doesn't demand any thoughts from you.  Tell her you'll
give it some thought after she's explained to your satisfaction why it is that she doesn't believe
in the existence of leprechauns.

BTW, the Institute for Creation Research is a young-Earth creationist faux-research organization
that produces voluminous quote mines and logical fallacies in pursuit of debunking evolution and
an old earth. The ICR is the unholy spawn of San Diego Christian College, and is a bunch of cranks
who want to undermine science education and eventually turn the US into a young-Earth  creationist,
dominionist society.

The ICR web site says: "The Institute for Creation Research is unique among scientific [sic ] research
organisations. Our research [sic ] is conducted within a biblical world-view, since ICR is committed to the
absolute authority of the inerrant Word of God. The real facts of science will always agree with
biblical revelation because the God who made the world of God inspired the Word of God."

One of the ICR's vice-presidents was the instigator of the famed "Gish gallop".  Say no more.

—Best to tactfully let the YEC and the Noah's descendants thing drop with your sister, if only for the
sake of family harmony.     

[Mathilda]

In this current study, the authors note that if humans have actually been around for several hundred thousand years or more, they should have accumulated 8 to 59 times the amount of mutations that we currently observe in Y-chromosome DNA sequence. However, the researchers in this current study empirically demonstrate that we only observe about 4,500 years of mutation accumulation in the paternal ancestry contained in the record of the human Y chromosome.

They are making the erroneous assumption that mutations build up over time. It does not take into account the theory of evolution by natural selection and therefore is not scientifically valid.

This tells us that less fit members of a population will be less likely to breed and pass on their genes and mutations and so removing them from the gene pool over time.

[Bucky Ball]

I'm in a hurry today so I don't have time to look for it. But in goodwithoutgod's things copied from TTA there are two (as I recall) sections (one might be post 42 ??) on how we know the flood never happened. They would be instructional here. Also one of the most obvious reasons we know there was no flood ... is silt. All floods leave silt layers. There is no world-wide silt layer. Archaeologists and geologists have dug all over the world in countless sites. There is no silt later. The flood never happened.

[brewerb]

It's baffling that the believers use evolution to both prove and disprove the bible.

[Dancefortwo]

I'm in a hurry today so I don't have time to look for it. But in goodwithoutgod's things copied from TTA there are two (as I recall) sections (one might be post 42 ??) on how we know the flood never happened. They would be instructional here. Also one of the most obvious reasons we know there was no flood ... is silt. All floods leave silt layers. There is no world-wide silt layer. Archaeologists and geologists have dug all over the world in countless sites. There is no silt later. The flood never happened.

Amazingly, YEC have tried to use the Grand Canyon as a global flood example but if this were true there would be Grand Canyons all over the place.  

"Creation science" isn't a science, it's religion trying to dress itself up in a white coat. No creation scientist has ever found a medical cure for any disease. ZILCH.   They never provide peer review papers of their assertions. NONE.   Every cure and medical breakthrough are from scientists who acknowledge evolution happened and is still happening.  As a matter of fact most of modern medicine is based on evolution and wouldn't work in humans if evolution weren't true.

[Minimalist]

No creation scientist has ever found a medical cure for any disease.

The idiots think "prayer" will help.  Which supports your position that they are religious nuts and not at all scientific.

[Bucky Ball]

I'm in a hurry today so I don't have time to look for it. But in goodwithoutgod's things copied from TTA there are two (as I recall) sections (one might be post 42 ??) on how we know the flood never happened. They would be instructional here. Also one of the most obvious reasons we know there was no flood ... is silt. All floods leave silt layers. There is no world-wide silt layer. Archaeologists and geologists have dug all over the world in countless sites. There is no silt later. The flood never happened.

Here's one. http://atheistdiscussion.org/forums/show...1#pid25371
Here's the other. http://atheistdiscussion.org/forums/show...2#pid25392
Here's all of them. http://atheistdiscussion.org/forums/show...p?tid=1442