Ancient penguin DNA raises doubts about accuracy of genetic dating techniques

Oregon State University ^ | Nov 10, 2009 | Unknown

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks decimon. In Horus vol II no 1, a journal published by the late David Griffard, Barry Fell was interviewed. Among other things: We learned that seals were coming to a bad end and being mummified by nature in Antarctica in 1200 A.D. That was interesting and we wondered what was happening in Antarctica at that time...one of the technicians... noticed that a seal carcass that he himself had shot for dog-meat and that got left out through the winter... [looked] just like the mummified seals that they had been sending in. So without telling too many people what he was doing, he sent this mummified seal to be carbon-dated and do you know it was dated to 1200 A.D., and he had shot it the year before. When that was made public it really caused a storm... We had two successive volcanic eruptions on the island of Tonga. There were human remains, then a layer of lava, then more human remains, then a layer of lava. We took charcoal out of both layers and had them both dated -- and we didn't tell them, the dating people, which layer which came from -- and to our amazement we learned that the whole island of Tonga has rotated through 180 degrees and is now upside down. The top layer is older than the bottom layer of the charcoal. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[rae4palin]

Great stuff.

[allmendream]

No, the amount of change is set - a measured difference between two species of common ancestry - or a measure of difference between “fossil” DNA and the DNA of its modern descendants.

For example one could see a difference in a particular ERV shared between dogs and wolves that is X% different - and that X% difference is assumed to cover the time that dogs have diverged from wolves. The X doesn't change, it is a measured amount (for those particular sequences).

What the research is attempting to change is the amount of TIME that it would take for an X% difference to form; they say that X% that would be 20,000 years should be 40,000 to 60,000 years.

That means that the RATE of change is one half to one third as rapid as previously expected; not twice or three times as fast - as is also maintained, despite the inherent contradiction.

As I said, somewhere between the actual science and the publication of this in the school paper; someone got confused.

[colorado tanker]

So, some folks have been using the dart board method of dating?

[decimon]

No, the amount of change is set...

Not the amount of change but the number of changes.

[decimon]

A man who dates carbon wastes time.

[allmendream]

The number of changes adds up to the amount of change.

A 13% divergence in an ERV sequence shared between two species that is 1000 bases long is a “number of changes” of 130.

[decimon]

The number of changes adds up to the amount of change.

But each change is one state of evolution. If there are many more changes than has been believed then the rate of evolution is faster than has been believed.

[allmendream]

But they are not questioning the measurement techniques that derived the amount of differences in similar DNA sequences, the amount of change DID NOT CHANGE for all the species, they are trying to say that absent a good fossil focal point, divergence dates BASED UPON THE AMOUNT OF CHANGE THAT WAS MEASURED AND HAS NOT CHANGED OR BEEN QUESTIONED need to be pushed out two to six times as much.

Are you following?

Say that previously a 10% difference in a particular DNA region between two species of a particular type and generation time (say two types of badgers) was assumed to correspond to a 10,000 year difference should be 20,000 or 60,000 BASED upon their penguin data.

The “rate of evolution” would be SLOWER, if that 10% difference took some 40,000 years instead of 10,000.

Why are we back to this? It is not a difficult concept. I thought we had moved on to EXPLAINING how they could claiming both contradictory things. Why am I having to explain the contradiction again?

[decimon]

Are you following?

I'm following you doing everything to promote your own thesis and nothing to understand the article.

[allmendream]

It is suddenly my own thesis that if a change takes three times as long it's rate is only one third as much?

Is it also my own thesis that one third is a slower rate not a faster rate?

OK then.

I consider my very own thesis to be supported by the evidence and the most rudimentary mathematics, therefore anyone who disagrees with my own thesis must not be able to think their way out of a wet paper sack.

[grey_whiskers]

Cheers!

[decimon]

Buttering me up? I hope it’s real butter. ;-)

Let’s say that it’s been believed that you finished off 100 servings of popcorn over the past 20,000 years (hence the grey whiskers). But it’s now believed that you finished off 2,000 servings of popcorn over the past 200,000 years. The rate of change of your popcorn consumption would thereby have increased by twice.

Substitute DNA changes for popcorn servings and you have it.

[blam]

I’ve suspected for some time that something isn’t quite right with our DNA science. This may just be one thing that is wrong.

[decimon]

I’ve suspected for some time that something isn’t quite right with our DNA science. This may just be one thing that is wrong.

It would be nice to see more things reported as hypotheses rather than conclusions. But then, they might not be reported.

[Jaime2099]

So basically what they are saying is that scientists have no idea what they are doing when it comes to dating techniques. Knock me over with a feature.

[decimon]

So basically what they are saying is that scientists have no idea what they are doing when it comes to dating techniques.

Yeah, it's the jocks that get all the action.

[AndyJackson]

It would be nice to see more things reported as hypotheses rather than conclusions.

Any good scientist understands that any conclusion is merely tentative based upon the soundness of ALL of the underlying assumptions and ALL of the observed facts, and the change of any of these will likely change the conclusion. So what you hope, actually goes unsaid because it is already known to the professional audience that reads these papers.

[AndyJackson]

we have been pointing this out for years!!!

Sorry GGG, but you cannot disprove the theory of evolution based upon genetic mutations by asserting that someone is mistaken about the rate of mutation, asserting that because the rate is slower than previously believed evolution is disproven. Your argument is an argument for a theory of evolution, just one with the rates jiggered, sort of like claiming Einstein was wrong because the speed of light is 20% slower than everyone thought it was.

[decimon]

So what you hope, actually goes unsaid because it is already known to the professional audience that reads these papers.

That's one reason I'm not too critical of these articles. When there is a link to an original paper, that paper is often too much to tackle for a non-professional. The article is just someone's attempt to present the material in the paper to a general audience.