Todd's Blog

In my previous post , I began examining a recent blog exchange between Dennis Venema and Fuz Rana. In Venema's  post , he documented that RTB's position on the chimp/human genome comparisons as published in three RTB books appeared to ignore the sequenced chimp genome published in 2005. Here are Venema's conclusions: Taken together, these findings demonstrate the following: (a) RTB carefully followed the primary literature on human / chimpanzee comparative genomics up until and including a major paper published in 2004, even if it represented such studies selectively to their constituents; (b) RTB was aware of the key 2005 whole-genome study and correctly understood its implications at the time the first 2006 edition of Connections was drafted in late 2005; (c) RTB has made no mention of this paper (nor any paper in this field published since 2004) in two major works published after this paper was available; (d) RTB continues to claim, five years after this paper was pu...

In my last post before Christmas, I indicated that I would be discussing Reasons to Believe in my next posts. Unfortunately, what started as a single response to some of Fuz Rana's recent assertions about the chimpanzee genome has turned into a long series of posts. Having written almost the entire series of posts already, I've become discouraged by the length and detail of my criticisms. I have even debated whether or not I should bother posting what I've written, since I'm sure it will be either ignored by RTB or misconstrued as personal attack or insult. Despite that, though, I do think I have a duty to the public and to the truth to set the record straight on a topic that I'm familiar with: comparative primate genomics. I wrote a paper on the subject back in 2006, just after the chimp genome was first published ( here ), and I've mentioned the topic numerous times on this blog: Chimp and human Y chromosomes radically different? Chimp genome again ...

For those readers who have suffered through this entire series, I apologize for going on so long. I initially intended to write one response to the Rana/Venema exchange (Venema's first and second critiques, and parts one , two , three , four , and five of Rana's response). After studying Rana's responses, though, I kept finding more and more things that troubled me, and this turned into the blog series THAT WOULDN'T DIE (parts one , two , three , four , five , six , and seven ). Now I'm just going to be done with this, but not because I've exhaustively documented all of Rana's mistakes and misunderstandings. I'm just getting discouraged with the sheer number of errors that riddle Rana's writing, and I believe there are better ways to spend my limited time. So I'm just going to offer some parting thoughts directly to the leadership of Reasons to Believe . First, you have not adequately responded to Venema's principle critique: Why...

Just when I thought I was done writing this series, Fuz Rana posted a fourth response to Venema's critique of RTB. In previous posts in this series ( one , two , three , four , and five ), my responses to Rana's posts can be placed in three categories. First, I've found that Rana misrepresents or misunderstands published data or arguments (both the informal blog post of Venema and peer-reviewed, scientific papers). Second, I've tested Rana's hypothesis about the similarity of the chimp and human genomes, and I found that it failed. Third, I disputed Rana's interpretation of the data, especially his assertion that the similarity of the human and chimp genome is meaningless. In his fourth post , Rana doesn't present any new arguments. Instead, he just reiterates his previous claims. Or so it seems. Here's where he begins, in a paragraph that is copied verbatim in parts two and three of Rana's response to Venema: Most people are familiar w...

When the Neandertal genome was published with its impressive evidence of interbreeding with modern Homo sapiens , I wrote , I do think these results bode poorly for Reasons to Believe, but I'm sure they'll come up with some kind of spin to explain why these results do not support their idea of Neandertals as non-human animals. That should be entertaining. To satisfy my curiosity, I checked out their website last week and found lots of anti-Neandertal articles. Their big statement came in an hour-long podcast, which you'll find on their podcast page . It turns out I was wrong. Their response was not entertaining. It was mindboggling and in places irritating. First let's review the RTB position, then I'll dissect a few claims from their podcast. There are so many bizarro claims in this podcast, I'll have to deal with them over a series of posts. Reasons to Believe is an old-earth creationist ministry (a "think tank" as they describe themselves...

Remember that Denisova mtDNA sequence from Siberia? The one published earlier this year that was more different from modern humans than Neandertals? In this week's Nature , the same research team has published the full nuclear genome of Denisova . It answers some of my questions and raises new ones. Some thoughts: 1. The genome is more similar to the Neandertals than to modern humans, which is different from the mitochondrial genome analysis , which placed Neandertals and humans together as sisters, with Denisova as the outgroup. The authors (Reich et al.) hypothesize that this represents incomplete lineage sorting, which is a phenomenon that occurs in the early stages of speciation when different genes have different phylogenetic histories. 2. They sequenced a second Denisovan mtDNA genome from a tooth found at the same site. This mtDNA genome differed from the first Denisovan mtDNA genome by only two nucleotide positions. This second mtDNA genome gives independent confirmati...

In the midst of my dissection of Reasons to Believe 's podcast on the Neandertal genome (Parts One , Two , and Three ), I received an automated email from RTB: Dear Todd, The last several years have seen RTB step out in using the latest technology to expand our outreach and our scope. ... Will you make a donation of $35 or more before the end of May to help RTB continue to use the latest technology to expand our outreach and our scope? ... Counting on you, Hugh Ross Pure hilarity! Sorry, but I'm afraid I won't be donating $35 to RTB by the end of May. Considering RTB raked in nearly $3.3 million in gross receipts from July, 2008 to June, 2009 [ PDF ], I don't think my measly $35 will be missed. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

This week, I'm discussing a series of articles on human origins from the September issue of PSCF (see parts one and two ). Today's article is Dennis Venema's Genesis and the Genome: Genomics Evidence for Human-Ape Common Ancestry and Ancestral Hominid Population Sizes . This is the only scientific entry in the series (the other three are biblical/theological papers), and the first to specifically advocate an evolutionary creation perspective. The bulk of the article was spent discussing the similarity between human and animal genomes, especially focusing on similarities that indicate that humans and animals share a common ancestor. I'm sure some of my readers are hoping for an answer to this part of his presentation, but I'm going to disappoint those readers. I've addressed very similar issues (not exactly the same) in my 2006 chimp genome paper . Since that paper, my assessment of the issue has not changed, and despite my explanation that common desig...

This week, I've been discussing a recent blog post by Dennis Venema critiquing RTB's published statements on the chimp genome. Previous posts ( one , two , three , and four ) have examined Fuz Rana's four part response posted on the RTB website ( one , two , three , and four ). I've already documented a series of factual errors and misquotations in Rana's posts. Yesterday, I tested Rana's hypothesis about why the human and chimpanzee genomes are not really 98-99% identical, and my results showed that Rana was wrong. Today, I want to address Rana's claim that such similarity measures are "meaningless." The theme of Rana's third (abbreviated) post responding to Venema is that the gross genomic similarity really doesn't tell you anything about how similar or different organisms really are. According to Rana, The crux of his [Venema's] criticism was that... We misrepresent scientific opinion when we claim that the genetic compari...

There's a couple of interesting new papers in paleoanthropology this week. Nature has a report from Jaeger et al. on mid-Eocene anthropoid fossils from Libya. They're just teeth, but they represent taxa from Afrotarsiidae, Parapithecidae and Oligopithecidae, and there's also a species of Karanisia , which is a strepsirrhine. Why do we care? I'm glad you asked. Strepsirrhini represents the lorises, lemurs, and galagos. Haplorrhini includes the monkeys and apes, as well as those other three taxa listed above. The presence of this diverse set of primates in the mid-Eocene extends the stratigraphic range of these groups. In evolutionary terms, that means that these groups were already present in the Eocene, which Jaeger et al. interpret as evidence of much earlier primate evolution in Africa than previously expected or as evidence of migration to Africa of multiple primate lineages. From a creationist perspective, I think this is interesting especially in light o...

Is Genesis History?  has been shown twice now, and I've been casually following reactions, mostly on social media. I've been alternately sympathetic to and dumbfounded by the negative reactions.  In this post, I want to deal with one major recurring theme, which, as you've already guessed, is the false dichotomy. The day the movie opened, Paul Nelson, one of the experts in the film, posted a dissent from the film  on the day it opened, and I got some emails asking me what's going on. Paul's concerned about what he sees as a "false dichotomy" between historical Genesis and the "conventional view," which he described in the movie as "all the complexity of life [constructed] by strictly physical processes" (his quote).  According to Paul, it's possible to question the historicity of certain parts or interpretations of Genesis and still believe that God had to intervene to create life or major groups of creatures.  The dichotomy as...

In my previous posts in this series ( one and two ), I've examined claims made by Fuz Rana of Reasons to Believe about a blog post by Dennis Venema that raised important questions about RTB's presentation of research on the similarity of the human and chimpanzee genomes. In this post, I want to examine the details of Rana's technical justification for RTB's position on the human/chimp genome similarity, as summarized in Rana's second post responding to Venema. According to Rana, As discussed in Who Was Adam? , researchers have performed a number of studies that indicate a 98 to 99 percent genetic similarity between humans and chimps. But as Hugh Ross and I point out, these comparisons were based on relatively limited genetic regions and focused on a single type of genetic difference (called substitutions or single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs). Comparisons that encompass larger regions of the genomes and include other types of genetic differences (like ind...

In my previous works on anthropological topics, I maintained that creationists do not at present have a model to explain biological similarity. In my chimp genome paper , I elaborate the reasons for this in some detail. In my hominid baraminology paper , I merely cite Darwin's claim that similarities form a pattern that looks like a genealogy, thus supporting the inference of common ancestry. I've been criticized for this stance, but I'm not going to address those criticisms today. I'll just assert that I'm correct, which I am. The fact of similarity is easy to account for. Being created by one God would be a good reason for some degree of similarity to exist. Likewise, being created to occupy the same world or to participate in the same ecosystem would also necessitate some biological similarity. These types of considerations could explain why all living things use the same basic biochemical building blocks (amino acids, nucleotides, etc.), for example. What...

So I was going to lay off RTB for a while and talk about other things more interesting, but this was too shocking to ignore. Dennis Venema finished his series of posts on RTB and me over at BioLogos this morning. In part 3 , he takes a look at Rana's pseudogene claims , especially about the GLO pseudogene. Rana relied on young-age creationist Peter Borger's data from a paper in the old PSCID journal [ PDF ] to make his argument that pseudogene mutations are nonrandom. Venema rather easily shows how Borger's (and therefore Rana's) argument is bogus: Borger wasn't looking at mutations at all. Check out Venema's post for the full details. Borger's error is breathtakingly simplistic. Question for the day: Why is it so easy to find errors in the arguments of Reasons to Believe? Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

As you know, Reasons to Believe has a lot in common with your run-of-the-mill young-age creationists, except for the "young-age" part. They criticize evolution, have an affinity for design arguments (especially fine-tuned universe arguments), and they like to discuss theology and biblical studies openly. By accepting the conventional age of the cosmos and earth, they pretty much dispense with Flood geology and young-age cosmogonies. They also have to accept animal death before human sin, which they would argue is permissible biblically. The latest issue of their "ezine" New Reasons to Believe [ PDF ] contains an article by Fuz Rana called "Did God Create Flesh-Eating Bacteria? A Creation Model for the Origin of Human Disease." That definitely caught my eye, since I've been talking about this subject for years. The big question in my mind was how RTB would handle natural evil in a world where animal death preceded human sin? Reading the article w...