Genetics and Human Brain Evolution

Some of you may (or may not) be interested to know that eggasi (aka Mark Kennedy) is arguing the EXACT SAME THINGS on the CARM forum now, and is claiming that people 'run away' form his claimes, especially those involving indels.Insane? Or just really dumb?http://www.christiandiscussionforums.org/v/showthread.php

Wow, I didn't realise he was actually still arguing the same ridiculous point about how mutation rates are measured, I thought you just meant arguing about human brain evolution.How dumb do you have to be to still think you are right and everyone else is wrong when dozens of independent people on disparate sites point out exactly the same flaws in your reasoning.TTFN,WK

Oh yeah...And even after his disastrous tenure here was linked to, he just STILL keeps making the same claims.Truly pathetic.http://www.christiandiscussionforums.org/v/showthread.php

Ah, I remember this. Rarely is so much pwnage visited on one creationist, because they so rarely make any specific claims.This poor sap tried to appeal to science ... BWAHAHAHAHA!!!Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I think this is slightly unfair. After all we want IDists and creationists to be trying to make coherent arguments with reference to the scientific literature. At least Eggasai and Randman seem to have some idea of what the right approach should be even if they do fall down on the details.I think part of the problem is that they go straight to more recently published literature before they actually have a good understanding of evolutionary theory, genetics, or molecular biology. The problem is that they are often unwilling to admit that they don't know the basics.TTFN,WK

Hi, I'm new here. I was reading this thread and just when it was getting good it ended. I didn't get much of an education regarding biology and genetics beyond highschool. I had a couple questions relating to the OP's stance on the issue that he was debating.It seemed to me that he basically trying to state that to many mutations had occured in the time that humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor to account for the evolution of the human mind. Was that what he was trying to say? What was he wrong about?Thanks in advance,
b00tleg

That was essentially the argument he was making, although he had some other side arguments as well about any mutation affecting neural development having to be detrimental. A lot of different things.The principle thing in the mutation rate argument was that, even though he was aware of the existence of insertion/deletion mutations that could change lengths of DNA by deleting or inserting between 1 to several thousand base pairs, he insisted on treating the genetic difference caused by insertion/deletion events as if they should be accounted for by the single base substitution mutation rate as if they were substitutions. Therefore a 1 kilobase insertion would represent 1000 mutational events. Consequently he produced a massive overestimation of the necessary fixation rate of mutations as he was really only estimating the average fixation rate of individual diverging nucleotides and ignoring the fact that thousands could be fixated at a time.When he started talking about actual genetic changes to specific genes he got almost everything wrong, including what the genes actually were, what types of mutations were seen and how widespread they were and even the way proteins are produced.He was wrong about a lot of other things too.TTFN,WK