Misdirection in Claim of 97% DNA match in Humans, Chimps

[sfs]

If you stick to a very much smaller list of reputable scientists,
and professional scientific journals and university publications,
then you are correct.

If you stick to those same scientists, you will also get a consistent story about the subject matter behind the news stories: humans and chimpanzees are related by common descent, comparison of their respective genomes overwhelmingly confirms this fact, and, whatever their faults, popular presentations of this fact are still more reliable than creationist arguments.

 

[Nazaroo]

And there are top scientists who have followed the scientific process and published all supporting documentation (that you can find and read yourself) showing where the various percentage relationships/similarities come from, how they arrived at their conclusions, what they were measuring, what they were comparing, the confidence levels of their statistics, etc. etc. All the stuff you demand has been done.

As a scientist, a have no beef with fellow scientists legitimately engaged in science.

That "lesser" scientists may not go into such detail when discussing the issue, or that pop-science magazines don't include all the background data does not negate the finding of those top scientists who did the work and properly published the results.

No one said it did.

What pop-scientism does do, is mislead thousands,
perhaps millions of ordinary readers, and it does so regularly,
and on an agenda-driven basis, not accidentally.

If a bank made an error in your favour,
you would recognize it as a mistake,
because money is their business, and they RARELY make such errors.

However, we observe that most money errors in business
are NOT in your favour, and since the bias is so extreme
in a single direction, and unaccountable by mere chance,
we can be fairly certain that most of those "errors"
are driven by profit and greed, and that most are not
corrected without protest, because there is profit in ignoring them.

You could argue that ALL such 'errors' are accidental,
but since most errors that are NOT in favour of the company
are actually caught and corrected, there is no way to
properly account for the disparity in frequency,
because the SAME METHODS are used to detect both types of error,
and would discover the both types of error with the SAME FREQUENCY.

Instead, negligence is the natural explanation, not accident,
because there is no profit in correcting errors in the company's favour.

In the same way, when inaccuracies all tend to favour an ideology,
we know that the inaccuracies are being filtered by the same ideology.

And the findings are that we are extremely genetically similar to our direct parents, slightly less genetically similar to other kin humans, slightly less genetically similar to other humans, slightly less genetically similar to other great apes, slightly less genetically similar to mice... And on it goes. The top scientists have demonstrated it and shown their work. If you want to show them to be wrong, you're going to have to do the same. But better, because between them all, they've done it a lot.

No one is challenging these trivial truisms or faulting scientists for finding them.

 

[sfs]

The problem isn't just blaming a few media mavericks.
The problem is one of defining exactly where the strictly scientific community starts and ends.

Many journals and magazines would like the recognition and prestige
of being considered a respected scientific journal,
but we all know that most are not up to the task.

In the same manner, scientists themselves form a bell-curve,
of worst, average, and best, in terms of accuracy and insight,
and strict scientific methodology. Only a top percentage
really deserve the credit and credibility that the best have earned.

This is pretty far off the mark, by the way. The scientific community doesn't have extremely well-defined edges, but its main outlines are pretty clear. Anyone who is employed as a scientist by a research university or national lab, for example, is part of that community. What separates the best from the merely average is almost never accuracy or adherence to scientific methodology. Rather, it is their creativity and drive that separate the best from other scientists.

Also by the way, if you want to make some kind of substantive argument about relatedness of genomes, please pick one argument and make it. I ignored almost all of what you've posted because it was too long, too gaudy and too emotion-laden.

 

[sfs]

As a scientist, a have no beef with fellow scientists legitimately engaged in science.

Due to a typo, your meaning is not clear here. Are you claiming to be a scientist?

 

[Skaloop]

As a scientist, a have no beef with fellow scientists legitimately engaged in science.

No one said it did.

What pop-scientism does do, is mislead thousands,
perhaps millions of ordinary readers, and it does so regularly,
and on an agenda-driven basis, not accidentally.

No one is challenging these trivial truisms or faulting scientists for finding them.

Wait, so you are saying they are engaged in legitimate science, and they are correct in their findings, but somehow that spreading that correct information is misleading?

Or by "trivial truisms" do you mean that the information they have gleaned is meaningless to the discussion of evolution? If so, fine. We've got a couple centuries of other evidence done by top scientists on all sorts of things that are far from meaningless and all point to the same thing that DNA mapping and comparison does.

 

[Loudmouth]

According to me, the scientific community should stick strictly to these procedures:


(1) State all findings with accompanying calculations for stated precision, and provide evaluations of accuracy, using properly calculated margins of error, etc.

That's exactly what they did.

Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome : Article : Nature

So where is the problem?

(2) Make sure all statistical claims are accompanied by statements of expected accuracy of results

, as is standard with polls, i.e., "this result is expected to be true in 7 out of 10 statistical samples" etc.

That was also done. Here an excerpt from the chimp genome paper:

Nucleotide-level accuracy is high by several measures. About 98% of the chimpanzee genome sequence has quality scores25 of at least 40 (Q40), corresponding to an error rate of ≤10^-4.
​

The human genome was sequenced with even higher quality contigs. The "weak link" in any comparison between chimp and human DNA is going to be the chimp data, but even that is high quality.

(3) State clearly the limits of all measurements

, especially sampling techniques, as in "10% sample of the 6 billion nucleotides were checked, and the findings were extrapolated to the other 90% based on the following theory..."

From the supplementary notes s1 from the chimp genome paper:

[FONT='Times New Roman','serif']The 37,931 chimpanzee scaffolds comprise 2.73 Gb of sequence and span 3.109 Gb of the genome.[/font]
​

So they had high quality sequence for 2.73 billion bases spanning a genomic distance of 3.11 billion bases. Again, all of this information is given by the scientists.

(4) State clearly the theoretical basis for all empirical claims.

This is also stated throughout the chimp genome paper.

(5) Strictly avoid all ambiguous language in reporting findings.

In particular, avoid bumbling amateur mistakes, like confusing "similar" with "identical", and failing to state the mathematical type of "average" that is meant.

Can you please cite specific findings in the chimp genome paper that you would consider ambiguous?

Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome : Article : Nature

If propagandists, apologists, and popularizers of scientific findings followed these rules, you wouldn't have fiascos like this.

I agree that secondary, non-science writers tend to muddy the waters, but this is not the fault of scientists. In the papers that the actual scientists write the facts are quite plain, explained in excrutiating detail, and also describe the methodologies used in the comparison. <Staff Edit>

 

[Loudmouth]

If you stick to a very much smaller list of reputable scientists,
and professional scientific journals and university publications,
then you are correct.

The problem isn't just blaming a few media mavericks.
The problem is one of defining exactly where the strictly scientific community starts and ends.

Many journals and magazines would like the recognition and prestige
of being considered a respected scientific journal,
but we all know that most are not up to the task.

In the same manner, scientists themselves form a bell-curve,
of worst, average, and best, in terms of accuracy and insight,
and strict scientific methodology. Only a top percentage
really deserve the credit and credibility that the best have earned.

Likewise, the educational system, along with its many propagandists,
apologists, and pop-science commentators is a sprawling and
often inaccurate dissemination engine of a very uneven mixture
of science, quasi-science, semi-science, pseudo-science, and scientism.

But they all want to be called "scientists".

Here is a quote from the chimp genome paper:

"We calculate the genome-wide nucleotide divergence between human and chimpanzee to be 1.23%, confirming recent results from more limited studies12, 33, 34."

If a secondary media person reports that there is a 1.3% difference between humans and chimps and then cite the chimp genome paper, how are they misleading the public?

 

[FreeinChrist]

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