GunnerJ

Go for it! Remember when those guys submitted a paper to an English class churned out by the postmodernist generator, and got an A? (Or did this actually happen? Can't remember.)

RufusAtticus

The understanding of mitochondrial eve is off. Coalescence does not imply that we only have one ancestor at that point in time. It's hard to explain coalescence with out a blackboard, but I'll try.

Let's say we start out with a population of 6 individuals (12 genes). Now when they reproduce to form the next generation, by chance some of these 12 genes might not be passed on. So in the next generation of the original 12 genes, only 10 or 11 remain. The population reproduces again and more genes are lost, say only 9 of the original genese remain. This will continue until only one of the original 12 genes are left. Here are the results of an example I wrote in Excel. Each line is a generation, and each cell represents a gene. As you can see, only the "1" gene, or rather its descendents, remains in the population after thirty or so generations.
Now if this happens when going forward in time, it also happens going backwards. In other words, those twelve genes coalesce at some point in the past and share a common ancestral gene. This is what Mt-Eve and Y-Adam represent, the hypothetical ancestors who "won" the coalescence race, with respect to mitochondria and the Y-chromosome.

Furthermore, the author's statement about the time of Mt-Eve fitting into a "biblical framework" is simply false. It relies on a Weiland paper that quote mines from an actual scientific article.

His comments about low human diversity are also based in faulty reasoning. For example, " Mutations should have produced much more diversity than 0.1% over millions of years." No support for this statement is offered. Another one, "Evolutionary models of origins did not predict such low human genetic diversity," is also false since it is well established in the biological community that our ancestors did pass through a bottleneck. IIRC, the data suggests a bottleneck of ~10,000 individuals ~100,000 years ago.

The author also doesn't justify why 50 or so individuals founding the population of Europe is consistant with the global flood.

The data from human populations doesn't support a diaspora from a single point source in the middle east: "the tower of babel." A diaspora from a single point would produce a star phylogeny. However, what we see in the human population is that virtually all the variation is found in Africa, and the rest of the world is a small sub-set of this variation. The data shows that humans migrated out from Africa and gradually colonized the rest of the world. Amerind data supports this well because they are more closely related to north-east Asian populations. However, the ToB explaination cannot account for this.

Jayjay

I have my doubts if it'll work. TJ peer review might be sloppy on the content, but I'm sure that they pay very close attention to the background of the contributors. Even a slightest hint that the submitted paper might not have been written by a god fearing creationist fanboy and you're out. And if they do catch a fake paper like this, it's guaranteed that they'll use it as a propaganda tool. "See? Our peer review caught this godless village atheist!"

EDIT: Oh and thanks for the review above.

RufusAtticus

That's why God invented Hotmail.

Sauron

Rufus, this would be extremely useful. Have you thought about turning this into a paper for talkorigins.org?

Seeing creationists twist the 'mitochondrial eve' story into evidence for creationism really gets old sometimes.....

Valentine Pontifex

It would certainly be useful since I don't think that the Archive covers many of the points Rufus points out. And as a major side benefit of such an article is that people can learn some real genetics.

========

I might add that if creationists are going to use lack of human genetic diversity as evidence that humans originated recently then they must come to grips with the fact that other species have far greater diversity than humans do (and with far smaller population). If all the land mammals came from Noah's Ark then they should share man's lack of genetic diversity.

Valentine Pontifex

Well actually if this is to be done the person involved would have to be someone who not known to post pro-evolution articles -- obviously. It could be done but the work and time would likely not make the payoff worth it. One have to be say a graduate student who claims to AiG that he need to keep the he is a creationist a secret, one would have to establish an online creationist identity that AiG would be aware of, etc.

Of course it would be high risk because AiG might still might check up a few reference. If it discovers that they are completely false, the game is up and they get to have a field day. That would probably give them more benefit then the benefit that could be derived from embarrassing them if the hoax succeeded. Also the false claims the hoax makes would be spread for years even after the hoax is revealed.

Thus while it might work, it is probably not a good idea even ignoring ethical considerations.

Arikay

Yeah, it would be a good idea if AIG wasnt AIG but in general they make a big enough fool out of themselves to warrant the risk of them having a field day with it.

Jayjay

That's not exactly true, if I've understood the creationist view correctly. They seem to think that everything in nature is "running down" rapidly and genetic diversity is caused by harmful mutations. Therefore, creationism kind of predicts that those species with shorter generation span than humans should have higher genetic diversity, whereas species with longer generations should have less diversity. Right?

Jayjay

Whipping up a fake article that mimics creationist rhetorics and style might not be that hard, and I wouldn't consider it unethical to expose AiG this way. However, since they most likely do scrutinize their contributors it's not just a matter of writing an article but also of creating an elaborate false identity and flat out lying to the AiG folks about who you are, what church you attend to, when and how you became a creationist, what's the last creationist propaganda book you've read, etc. Even if the hoax were successful, this is ethically questionable not to mention that it might make a dent in one's reputation.