Hi @Van_Dreams -
I appreciate that you have come to the forum and asked for a differing perspective on a scientific hypothesis. Many, perhaps most, folks prefer not to expose themselves to data that might contradict their cherished beliefs. You are taking a bold step which I enthusiastically commend.
The article you reference is 17 months old and is based on an article by N. Jeanson that has been thoroughly debunked by geneticists. Among other problems:
- He ignores the effect of coalescence.
- He extrapolates broadly from a tiny sample of the genome, while ignoring the molecular clock calculations based on the entire human genome.
These severe problems by themselves render the ICR article invalid.
However, these are not even the biggest problems in the Jeanson paper. The chief problem is that he fails to distinguish between somatic mutations and germ cell mutations. This leads to an error in his molecular clock calculation by a factor of about 50.
This post on another forum explains the error in greater detail:
Note that Jeanson throws out all pedigree-based mutation rate estimates in favour of data from essentially a single paper, Maretty et al. (2017). In doing so, he’s throwing out all studies that used trios or other long genealogical lines in favour of one that only looked at two generations, fathers and sons. As a result, the data is unable to distinguish de novo germ line mutations from somatic mutations, making it all but worthless for estimating a mutation rate for molecular clocks,
This is Jeanson making exactly the same mistake as he did in the past for mtDNA mutation rate studies, although in those articles he had the honesty to mention this caveat in the text. In this Y chromosome article, the word “somatic” doesn’t even appear once.
Do you have any questions about this analysis, @Van_Dreams? Do you understand the difference between somatic and germ cell mutations? Are you familiar with coalescence? Are you familiar with the well established scientific literature on human genetic molecular clocks that take into account the entire genome, rather than a tiny sample?
I am not a biologist, but I (or others on this forum) would be happy to answer any questions you might have to the best of my (our) abilities.
Blessings,
Chris Falter