The Young-Earth Hyper-evolution Hypothesis: A Collection of Critiques

Trevor,

The deck-of-cards illustration was intended to be just that: illustrative, not rigorous. Jeanson and his AiG friends haven’t really provided a clear picture of how the genetic diversity purportedly present at Creation somehow managed to survive through to the postflood world. Did God create a single pair of each baramin on the sixth day, or whole populations? If the latter, did each of those holobaramins already contain distinct monobaraminic species, or were they all essentially the same species? Was the Ark Kind the result of a particular lineage that essentially cloned itself each generation, thus preserving the same genetic information present in the original creation, or was it a monobaraminic species which preserved only a subset of the genetic information of that holobaramin, or was it some sort of hybridized descendant which somehow contained all the genetic information of the holobaramin via reproduction between separate monobaramins?

You claim that my statements about non-coding DNA are “simply false”, but you don’t actually show this; instead you simply make some completely unsubstantiated claims of your own. Non-coding DNA is certainly constrained, and it certainly represents significant interspecies variation (you’d expect this, given that it is the majority of DNA), but these facts do not in any way suggest that its existence provides sufficient explanation for rapid speciation. Speciation requires selectable allele frequency changes, which can only take place in coding DNA.

As a side note, it IS possible that non-coding DNA could serve as a mechanism for rapid speciation, if the data were different. For example, suppose that different species within the same “kind” all had nearly identical DNA but with different segments being coding or non-coding. But that’s not what we see.

In any case, Jeanson’s argument was itself different from what you’re proposing. He claimed that because constrained regulatory functions may exist within non-coding DNA, this somehow suggests a reduced barrier for speciation via allege frequency changes in coding DNA. It is a total non sequitur, and that’s what I was pointing out in my post.

Your claim about the likelihood of rapid speciation by existing genetic variation is pure speculation with no more evidential basis than Jeanson’s arguments. You can discuss the details of reproduction all day long, but if your conclusion is still “so there’s a lot of variation here so I guess anything is possible” then you are just making an argument from personal incredulity. If you want to actually advance a realistic model, you’d need to explain what levels of genetic diversity can lead to immediate speciation within a few generations and point to actual examples of that today. Science without math is fiction.

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Hi David,

Its a pleasure talking to you directly. As to your illustration, non-rigorous word pictures are fine as long as they don’t miss the mark by minimizing the reality of the larger picture that they are attempting to represent. Unfortunately, your illustration doesn’t capture the true essence of genetic variation and its sources. The aspects that your illustration are missing can be found among the details that I discussed, as you put it, “all day long” in my previous comment.

You won’t get any arguments from me about the incomplete nature of current creationist models. If you read any of my recent comments here, you’ll see that I’m very honest that creationists have a great deal of work do to in making their models ready for prime time (e.g. parsing out the baraminic structure of early life, etc). But none of that is germane to the comments I made about your article. To that point, I’m not sure what more substantiation you are looking for. I gave primary literature references that I think both represent the larger body of knowledge and demonstrate that your statement about non-coding DNA is inaccurate. In my field, that IS the standard of substantiation. But if you can be more specific, I’ll gladly try to provide what you’re looking for.

Surprisingly, in your response to my comment, you’ve made another strikingly uninformed assertion. You said, “Speciation requires selectable allele frequency changes, which can only take place in coding DNA.” To hold the view that speciation and selection of changing allele frequencies are only relevant within coding DNA, you’d have to overlook a large segment of the last 25 years of research in genetics. For example, microRNAs, my area of research, do not code for proteins but are very much labile to allele frequency changes nonetheless. That alone should put the issue to rest, but let’s consider the issue more broadly in case you want to argue that you weren’t excluding non-coding RNAs. The term “allele” has traditionally been synonymous with the term “gene.” But more recently the term “gene” has taken on a different, or perhaps expanded meaning. We now understand that discrete regions of protein coding DNA that we once called genes (and still do for simplicity in most cases), act as “subroutines” within a genomic computer program, modified by other programs and functions that aren’t necessarily inherited together due to their genomic distance. The idea that you suggest (i.e. only alleles have selectable frequencies and only protein coding genes are alleles) is way out of vogue; another instance of where you seem to be oversimplifying reality. Consider also the fact that the majority of the genome is transcribed (and we don’t know what that means yet) and you’ll start to understand that your view of an allele leaves a lot to be desired. Any nucleotide variation in the genome could potentially be selectable. It doesn’t have to fall within a protein coding region, it only needs to modify the fitness of the organism in some way. In my field of cancer genetics, we routinely interrogate the entire genome with single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays in search of “alleles” that segregate with disease. We’ve identified thousands of such loci that do not fall within coding regions. Have a look at the first ten or so references in this paper and you’ll see what I’m talking about. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4288203/#B5. Any one of these loci could modify a disease phenotype such as cancer, and likewise any one could contribute to a speciation event.

Let me respond to this statement of yours; “DNA is certainly constrained, and it certainly represents significant interspecies variation (you’d expect this, given that it is the majority of DNA), but these facts do not in any way suggest that its existence provides sufficient explanation for rapid speciation.”

I agree. It doesn’t suggest that non-coding DNA DOES provide sufficient explanation for rapid speciation, but it does indeed suggest that it MIGHT or at least COULD. And that was my point. Joel is championing the idea that rapid speciation is a genetic impossibility given the lack of genetic variation after a bottleneck, etc. I am not trying to put forth a model where I prove how it can be done. I’m providing a plausible mechanism that, if explored further and tested, could demonstrate how the genetic bottleneck could be circumvented.

Also to this statement, “Your claim about the likelihood of rapid speciation by existing genetic variation is pure speculation with no more evidential basis than Jeanson’s arguments. You can discuss the details of reproduction all day long, but if your conclusion is still “so there’s a lot of variation here so I guess anything is possible” then you are just making an argument from personal incredulity.”

My claim is certainly speculative (most hypotheses are on some level), and I mentioned above that I’m not trying to put forth a model on this blog, nor is it a requirement to have a complete model in place in order to demonstrate the faults in an opposing argument. Nonetheless, my claim is certainly not lacking evidence. If you go back to the bottleneck post, you’ll find that I referenced a number of primary literature sources that support my position, the most important of which was the Wang 2012 paper http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412007891. What my argument was intended to do was to respond specifically to Joel’s assertion which states that there is not enough genetic variation to achieve rapid speciation. I demonstrated that there is actually a tremendous amount of variation possible which COULD enable such a phenomenon. As to your claim of personal incredulity, let me refine your unfortunate caricature of my position. I’d like to refine it rather than throw it out, because with some help, it could actually aspire to the acceptable structure of a scientific hypothesis. You suggest my disposition is “so there’s a lot of variation here so I guess anything is possible.” My disposition is actually, “Given the tremendous amount of variation demonstrated to be possible through meiotic division of germ cells, I hypothesize that such variation could provide the necessary genetic substrate through which natural selection could bring about rapid speciation.” Note how I’ve taken your cynical caricature and turned it into an actionable scientific hypothesis. I expect that this and other similar hypotheses will be tested by creationists in years to come.

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