Dec 01 2013

Daily Fail – Genetics Failure







Clearly not if he is making the frankly idiotic claim that the entire fossil record and the entire genetic record is incorrect and that humans involved from cross species breeding that somehow produced viable offspring that were fertile in a single genetic event that went on to produce our entire species…. And this is without pointing out that the humans didn’t evolve from chimpanzees but that we share a common ancestor. They are not our past, they are distant cousins.

Genetics does not work that way. Hybridisation exists between closely related species that diverged recently. Think “adjacent” branches on the genetic tree of life.

It is why horses and donkeys produce mules and jennys. And why both are sterile.

And one critical part of this is EVEN and this is important. EVEN if a Pig and a Chimpanzee could breed the resulting offspring would be an odd numbered chromosome animal and would probably be sterile.


Which is not an argument for pig heritage but for evolution. There are Marsupial Moles and the Platypus and no one’s suggesting that Kangaroos and Moles mated or that the duck billed platypus is the amorous union of duck, beaver and scorpion.

The origin of the species? A remarkable new theory advanced by a leading geneticist suggests that human beings may have originally emerged as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee

It’s not a remarkable theory, it’s idiotic and it’s not a theory. It’s a barely formed hypothesis that I would be embarrassed to produce as a teenager in a science class.




The majority of the divergent characteristics are not that divergent and are often due to our changes in lifestyle. We are nocturnal because we invented portable light sources quite early on in our evolution and our first portable light source was in fact a rather devastating weapon in itself. So it made us less scared of the dark. We don’t fall asleep when it gets dark because we do not need to.

We didn’t need to evolve night-vision to do that.

The list he makes from his article is simply weird. There is no rhyme or reason to his list and many of the conditions are self explanatory. Chimps don’t get skin cancer probably because they are covered with hair and because they don’t live all that long in the wild. While we have a lot of hair (in fact if I am correct we are hairier than chimpanzees but our hair is short and fine so we don’t really feel it.


No it’s not evidence. It’s incredibly poorly thought out out and forgets some basic rules of how genetics works.



They aren’t massive. I mean if they were so massive we wouldn’t have triggered on to our similarity to chimpanzees which we did not via genetics but through anatomical similarity.


We have had more than a million years of divergent evolution to get to this point. Using molecular clocks we estimate the split to be around 4.5 to 6 million years ago. That’s a long long time to evolve things particularly considering our range is a lot more colder than the chimpanzee and so many of these features would come about particularly since our tool usage kind of made fur redundant. Other animals need to have thick fur, we invented clothes and fire…

And light coloured eyes? Speak for yourself. Most humans are Asian and South Asian and African and South American and most eyes are dark coloured and brown. I bet it’s a higher number than 50%.



That’s because those specific things we take from them are LOW in antigen and so don’t trigger our immune system.

Similarities: Dr Eugene McCarthy suggests that humans’ hairless skin and subcutaneous fat could be explained by porcine ancestry

Or by actually looking at evolutionary pressures to develop those things.



Okay that makes some sense since that is genetically “possible” however the problem is the assumption that pigs and chimpanzees are fertile in the first place.

And back-crossing is generally used in populations of breeds of species rather than such widely diverged species.



Because it’s bad science and it’s rather idiotic to print bad science.


Oh look! The Lord and Master of FTB smacked that down himself!




I don’t even know what analogy to make to point out how bad this is as a scientific piece. This is as bad as the creationist nonsense.


I disagree Mr. Myers. The pig’s done nothing to deserve this.



Because the idea is fundamentally flawed in important and vital ways. And science publishers have pointed that out. I am not an expert on genetics to the point of Dr. Myers but frankly even I can see the flaws in this theory. I would have seen the flaws in the theory in high school. This is such a fundamental flaw that I fear that this man is just another crackpot in charge of the education of scientists who is tarnishing that education with a misunderstanding of the basics of the field he claims (or atleast the Daily Mail claims) he is an expert in.




The Daily Mail is irresponsible. It’s giving a platform to a complete quack. It’s not evolutionary science but woeful pseudoscientific conspiracy theory. There is no evidence for any of the claims he made and/or any of the understanding he has of hybrids. His understanding of such may be solid but the genetics is simply wrong.

To produce such blatantly faulty science as “Mainstream Evolution” and “from leading scientists” harms the scientific community because it includes these pseudo-scientists in the ranks of science.


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    The Daily Mail, indeed, has a problem. It’s a fascist rag run by ignorant twats, who wouldn’t acknowledge a scientific argument if it beat them over the head. And who have, as far as I can see, a political agenda to glorify stupidity, as per the Republicans on the other side of the water.

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    The thing is, it does seems quite plausible that the people behind the Daily Mail could be a cross between a chimp and a pig. It doesn’t reflect in any way on the rest of us. Chill out and let them get in touch with their roots if they want to.

    (end snark)

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    MattP (must mock his crappy brain)

    Wish he had stuck to identifying limited hybridization in avians instead of dragging the rest of the university through his pigsty. The drunken horde of football fans and the bible thumpers are embarassing enough; they don’t need the help of postdocs.

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    Rich Woods

    On the plus side, it does rightly say that pigs are quite intelligent and sociable. On the negative side, erm, everything else…

    Still, what else would you expect from the Daily Fail? An approximation of reality?

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    The Daily Fail strikes again. Over here we have the WorldNutDaily. The number of people who take that shit seriously is scary, because there are enough of them that politicians feel a need to pander to them.

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    The Daily Mail checked its sources and found a leading scientist with a PhD who is employed by an accredited University in the USA – and now it’s the Daily Mail copping all the flack.

    Might be better to start asking some questions about the education system in America, because that seems to be where the problem lies.

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    MattP (must mock his crappy brain)

    @ grumpyoldfart
    The fuckwit has not been at the university in several years and, as far as I can tell, was never more than a postdoc. His one claim to fame prior to this MFAP article is a large book collecting known avian hybrids. He claims to specialize in avian and mammal hybridization on google+, but the only peer-reviewed papers I can find from him are entirely about LTR retrotransposons in the genomes of rice and mice.

    While he may know a great deal about gene sequences, his BS in Math probably did not require more than one introductory undergrad biology course. From the short summaries of GENE class listing, it seems the genetics program focuses more on training lab technicians for genetic analysis rather than the actual biological mechanisms that underly genetics. Case in point: his MS thesis is a computer simulation (the paper it spawned) and his PhD dissertation is a data mining tool for genetics.

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    Actually, that mashup of Swan Lake and Giselle sounds interesting.

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    Daily Fail – Genetics Failure » A Million Gods tqhpljry iPhone Photo Recovery

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