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In Praise of FAIR
I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I just want to praise FAIR for their handling of DNA evidence in the dust-up over Rodney Meldrum's alternate geography of the Book of Mormon. Specifically, it warmed my heart to see a forthright defense of molecular clock. (I also appreciated their treatment of haplogroup X).
The idea of a molecular clock is simple enough: If you can determine how often mutations occur on average, then given differing sequences you should be able to estimate how long ago those sequences diverged from one another. Unfortunately it is more tricky than that in practice. About 10 years ago one study using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) turned up a problem with dating the most recent common ancestor (MRCA), sometimes called 'mitochondrial Eve,' when it came up with a date of 6,500 years ago.
However, there were a number of problems with this estimate and the method behind it, and using better methods mitochondrial Eve is currently estimated at about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. But as you might expect, creationists seized upon the finding as evidence supporting the Ussher chronology of the Bible. Never mind the fact that it didn't hold with all groups of people and disagrees with radiometric and other forms of dating, as well as molecular clock dating of the X and Y chromosomes, creationists have accused scientists of rejecting the six thousand-year figure simply out of bias against the Bible--an accusation that Rodney Meldrum apparently agrees with.
So thank you, FAIR, for explaining and defending the science.
1 comments:
In the 60’s a friend of the family worked at NASA. He built some radar boxes the left on the moon. I remember this because he used to bring me pictures from space; and some really cool models. I also remember my grandmother sitting on the front porch waiting for the world to end as soon as one of the astronauts set foot on the moon. She just sat there mumbling “Babylon; just like Babylon.” I also remember him telling me why the lunar Lander had such huge round feet. He explained to me how they had measured dust particles in space and over the millions of years there was probably as much as 30 feet of dust on the surface. The astronaut was going to blast off the moon if the craft sank too much. Everyone was waiting to see what was going to happen. Yes 3 or 4” of dust. Just like mars. All in all it was a pretty uneventful night except for the man on the moon thing. :)
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