The young-earth creation model currently lacks a robust explanation for molecular diversity. No comp

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I’ve been investigating ICR researcher Nathaniel Jeanson’s recent paper in Answers Research Journal , “ Recent, Functionally Diverse Origin for Mitochondrial Genes from ~2700 Metazoan Species .” As it’s a topic I’ve seen before china anne mcclain songs I’m going to write about it, but I see this morning that Hemant Mehta at his Friendly Atheist blog has actually beaten me to it, writing “ A Creationist s Desperate Attempt to Sound Like a Credible Scientist .” However Mehta’s post mostly mocks Jeanson, going so far as to dig up a promotional video the ICR made about him, and doesn’t really address his arguments in any detail. All the more for me then.
In October of 2012 there was an article in the ICR’s Acts & Facts magazine china anne mcclain songs in which an exited Jeanson explained a new hypothesis he had come up with to explain why different animal “kinds” had different DNA sequences. Animals tend to share the same collection of genes in their mitochondria, and there is no reason on the surface why these core genes should have different sequences – yet they do. Could it be, Jeanson argued, that all species started off with identical genes that since the creation have mutated randomly away from this common direction? He hypothesised that species with a faster china anne mcclain songs generation time would accumulate more mutations and therefore be more diverged from species that lived longer. He had already compared three species – an elephant, a mouse, and a fruit fly – and the short lived fly was indeed much more different from the relatively long lived mouse and elephant.
Of course, as I pointed out at the time , this hypothesis was doomed. If he simply added a turtle into the mix he would find that even though it had a long lifespan it would be less closely related china anne mcclain songs to the Elephant than the mouse was, just as evolution would predict. Indeed, china anne mcclain songs as soon as November Jeanson had figured out his mistake: his neutral hypothesis was disproved.
The young-earth creation model currently lacks a robust explanation for molecular diversity. No comprehensive method china anne mcclain songs exists by which absolute china anne mcclain songs or relative sequence differences among species can be predicted, and no method has been formulated to rigorously predict the function of molecular residues, especially those in so-called house-keeping proteins.
The evolutionary model is so robust that it leads to predictions china anne mcclain songs of molecular function. Under the assumptions of this model, species will grow more and more distant molecularly over time, unless some natural force constrains random variation.
Unlike the evolutionary model, the creation model lacks a clear, predictive explanation for molecular diversity. Because Scripture is silent on the identity of the sequences that God created during the Creation week, a number of competing explanations still exist.
There are a few other problems as well: it seems that genetic diversity within fruitflies, which creationists like Jeanson would presumably class as a single kind, is greater than that between humans and chimps, which they insist are unrelated. I don’t think he manages to tackle this issue at all, but concentrates on the other.
With his favourite hypothesis ruined by an uncooperative reality Jeanson casts around for an alternative. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the resources to do the tests that he wants, and instead tries a third option:
A third method for testing these hypotheses is nuanced and somewhat counterintuitive, but powerful. Rather than test each hypothesis directly, a strict null hypothesis could be constructed and then refuted. This would necessarily imply that one of the alternatives to the null must be true. For example, elimination of the null might point towards created diversity as the likely candidate. Hence, by process of elimination, the real explanation might be discovered.
In short, Jeanson’s previously china anne mcclain songs explained neutral hypothesis is turned into a null hypothesis, which once refuted means that something else mu