One of the internet memes propagated a broadcast by the Church Of Scienceology cult, those closed minded people who believe science is infallible omnipresent and omniescent is the "Weez Aalz From Afrieekaa" fallacy, so when I spotted online an article reporting a news study which, relying heavily on guesses and assumptions, made a case that all humans living outside Africa were put there by a mass migration between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. As a recent archeaological project quite recently found evidence of human habitation in Norfolk, England around one million years ago I decided to check out this obvious load of bollocks to see where the scientists had either gone wrong or obviously faked their results to secure their research grants.
Here's an extract of the original article (reproduced under fair use terms)
Australian Aborigines have long been cast as a people apart. Although Australia is halfway around the world from our species’s accepted birthplace in Africa, the continent is nevertheless home to some of the earliest undisputed signs of modern humans outside Africa, and Aborigines have unique languages and cultural adaptations. Some researchers have posited that the ancestors of the Aborigines were the first modern humans to surge out of Africa, spreading swiftly eastward along the coasts of southern Asia thousands of years before a second wave of migrants populated Eurasia.
Not so, according to a trio of genomic studies, the first to analyze many full genomes from Australia and New Guinea. They conclude that, like most other living Eurasians, Aborigines descend from a single group of modern humans who swept out of Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and then spread in different directions. The papers “are really important,” says population geneticist Joshua Akey of the University of Washington, Seattle, offering powerful testimony that “the vast majority of non-Africans [alive today] trace their ancestry back to a single out-of-Africa event.”
Yet the case isn’t closed. One study argues that an earlier wave of modern humans contributed traces to the genomes of living people from Papua New Guinea. And perhaps both sides are right, says archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, a co-author on that paper who has long argued for an early expansion out of Africa. “We’re converging on a model where later dispersals swamped the earlier ones,” he says.
A decade ago, some researchers proposed the controversial idea that an early wave of modern humans left Africa more than 60,000 years ago via a so-called coastal or southern route. These people would have launched their migration from Ethiopia, crossing the Red Sea at its narrowest point to the Arabian Peninsula, then rapidly pushing east along the south Asian coastline all the way to Australia. Some genetic studies, many on mitochondrial DNA of living people, supported this picture by indicating a relatively early split between Aborigines and other non-Africans. But analysis of whole genomes— the gold standard for population studies— was scanty for many key parts of the world.
The early part of the comment thread was a run of the mill squabble between Bible fundamentalists and Science fundamentalists. When scientific fallacies about DNA, early human development and how we share 50% of our DNA with our siblings I decided to join the thread, its always fun to wind up the science worshipppers. My contribution starts with throwing a banana skin into the mix for the science fanboys to slip up on.
We begin with a commenter styled 'error error' erroniously trying to challenge the theory that Australian aborininies were actually the first humans and are a genertically unique race.
error error • a day ago
What a load of bull. Mungo Man predated Aborigines. Not to mention it's erroneous to declare facts when you are basing stances off culture and language that were never recorded in any sophisticated method. I'd be amazed if Aborigines where here more than a thousand years. No constructions other than an eel dam. Population of around 10-20K.
Paul Beck error error • a day ago
But aren't the scientists reaching their conclusions based off of genomic analysis - and not culture and language? Such science is pretty sophisticated.
Arthur Foxake Paul Beck • a day ago
A biologist named Ann Marcaida (unfortunately now deceased) was enlightening me on basic genetics once and told me we share about 30% of our genome with bananas. I in my turn was able to assure her that a resident of the US west coast would be exposed to more radiation from eating a banana a day for a year than from stuff leaking out of Fukushima.
We also share a surprisingly high proportion of our DNA with amoeba. Genetics is not very sophisticated science at all. A lot of assumptions and guesswork are involved.
SeanM62 Arthur Foxake • 14 hours ago
Huh?? Hard to discern the argument from the banana. Your understanding of genetics?? Very much like "I know more, much more, than the generals about ISIS." There is a lot we don't know, but there is a new discovery every day, which makes genetics an extremely exciting subject!!
You have to love the sheer illogic of Sean's response. I demolish his attempts to be clever about bananas in my reply. Although I made it clear I am not a biologist and know little of genetics except what I have learned in conversation with biologists or read for general interest, I was involved in the nuclear industry for several years where I learned a lot about radioactivity and bananas.
Arthur Foxake SeanM62 8 hours ago
And thus in trolling for The Church Of Sciencology cult you show your ignorance. I do not have an argument on genetics, all I did was repeat what a very highly qualified research biologist told me. You should perhaps read of Rupert Sheldrake's genome wager with Lewis Wolpert on genetics - he may be unorthodox but he makes more sense sense than Dawkins.
As for the banana, well I know people like you are not interested in facts, but for those who might stumble on the thread and are, here's a wikileaks article explaining how the 'banana equivalent dose' is a standard measure of radioactivity in the nuclear industry.
And here's a handy calculator to help you work out the banana equivilent dose of anything and see that I was right about bananas (everything is radio - active to some extent and bananas are quite high on the scale.)
Whether Ann was right about genetics I could not say, but she did say that what we think we know of the subject is mostly based on the misunderstanding propagated by Dawkins (in the selfish gene). As she is not around to elucidate, a little research into epigenetics (the stuff in our genome we do not inherit biologically), now a recognised scientific field, throws most of the pseudo-scientific bullshit about (to misquote Zager and Evans) "Everything you think, do and say is written in your DNA.
And as for your tragically inept attempt at sarcasm in the reference to ISIS, it really depends on which generals you mean. Iranian and Syrian generals know quite a lot about ISIS I'd guess, Russian generals somewhat less and US generals nothing at all given that everything the USA has done to combat ISIS in the past three years has been the exact opposite of what needed to be done, assuming The White House has been telling us the truth and was actually trying to oppose ISIS rather than support them. Therefore what little I know about ISIS is certainly more than the US generals know because I would have been smart enough to avoid involvement in that mess, having learned lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fractal Film Dimensions Arthur Foxake • 16 hours ago
Arthur you're not a geneticist and you're simply not understanding how it works. It always makes me laugh when people claim to be experts about fields they know nothing about. You share %50 percent of your dna with siblings. Does that mean you share more with chimp than your own brother?
Here we have a perfect example of someone whose argument is, "You're not a scientists, you don't understand how science works," Does Fractal Film Dimensions know more than I do about the topic under discussion. We shall see.
Arthur Foxake @ Fractal Film Dimensions • 4 minutes ago
What makes me laugh is when science trolls trot out the stock answers according to the dogma of their faith. "You're not a scientist so you don't understand how science works," how many times have I seen that on the comments of various people who tried to inject something unorthodox into a thread. I wonder if you science fanboys understand how like the inquisitors of the medieval Catholic Church you attitudes are.
My comment made clear I am not a geneticist. What the biologist I mentioned told me about human DNA and bananas is in fact well documented, here's one source, you can find hundreds more if you put an hour into research http://www.scientificamerican
You say I share 50% of my DNA with siblings. Hopelessly wrong, in fact all humans share 99.9% of their DNA with other humans. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ . So are you saying my siblings and I are actually not related? Or that my siblings are bananas? What you are actually grasping for but failing to get hold of is that of the very small fraction of DNA that is not common to all of us humans, 50% is shared with my siblings.
Hmmm, you might want to edit or remove your comment, it seems I know far more about science than you.
TJ @ Fractal Film Dimensions • 8 hours ago
That's not an apples and apples comparison.
For example, you share a MUCH higher percentage of "DNA" with your brother than 50%, your brother and you ONLY differ in the specifics on the chromosomes donated by your two parents...
...which means that in the context of the percent of DNA difference between a man and chimp for example being closer to 98%, you and your brother would be closer to 100% in that context.
So, half of your DNA is from mom, and half is from dad...but, so is your brother's.
Your parent's DNA was also ~ 100% the same too....and so forth, give or take a mutation.
Its not the skin color or hair color differences, and other fairly meaningless differences we are talking about, its about whether you are still human, or, a fruit fly, or, fruit.
:D
Fred Thomas @ Arthur Foxake • 5 hours ago
You obviously don't know anything about science, Arthur. It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.
This is the kind of comment I love, full of ignorance and self importance and it shows Fred's eagerness to tell me I know knothing about science so overwhelmed any vestige of common sense he may have had that he jumped it without having read any of the preceding comments. Had he done so he would have found confirmation of my points (which admittedly were made in a way that intended to wind up the science fanboys rather than accurately inform - there's no point preaching ruth to religious zealots) in the links provided. All he manages to show us is if all you can contribute is a tired old cliche it's better not to comment that to show how unimaginitive you are. (and I can assure him my mouth was shut when I typed all my comments - dribbling into the keyboard does not do computers any good at all.
Arthur Foxake Fred Thomas • a minute ago
I'm not wasting time trying to educate you Fred, take a look at my replies to the others in this thread who have said I don't know anything about science and inform yourself on how foolish I could have made you look.
error error @ Paul Beck • 11 hours ago
The problem is DNA is more or less unreadable after a short period. The hope in reproducing and find reconciling the missing data, is outside the abilities of a project as this.
TJ @ error error • 8 hours ago
They are comparing READABLE DNA from ancient samples, to CURRENT DNA in the population at large....so, the fact that, yes, DNA CAN degrade over time, is not a deficiency in the study.
The use of proteins in ancient samples, to trace a lot of what DNA was used to trace, has added a new dimension to tracing relationships between long dead fossils...as the proteins often survive far longer.
Also - a general reminder that almost all known living things share common DNA, you, and a sponge at the bottom of the ocean, share common DNA.
Essentially, the more ancient the "function", the more likely that the DNA that did that function billions of years ago, is still involved.
So, the percentage of DNA between a monkey and his banana, or a man and his banana or monkey, or the banana and a fruit fly, etc, is closer than you might realize.
:D
There are many things about the science fanboys (and they are almost always boys) that make winding them up so much fun. The first is that in their evangelical zeal to suppress and questioning, criticism or ridicule of 'science' they do not seem able to grasp that someone using the name "Arthur Foxake" might not be entirely serious. Second is that many of them being borderline autistic they tend to read everything literally. For example, one would expect an intelligent person to spot instantly that anyone talking about anything so outlandish as radio - active bananas (even though bananas are in fact radio - active as shown in my link,) was playing some kind of trick. The others are too numerous to list.
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