The Ketchum Paper - What the experts say.

CMcMillan wrote:This was posted on Melbas fb Wall by Timothy Collins. My question is this. If he can figure this out why cant so many others.

Firstly, I would treat anything coming from MKs FB wall as unconfirmed. Secondly this is the opinion of a layperson who has not looked at the paper and is unqualified to interpret the sequencing (compare that to the individuals in the above video).

The rest of the testimony is largely related to the accuracy and professionalism of the labs involved with the testing. That isn't necessarily a factor that is in doubt. There is still no confirmation that the cited labs were involved, so verification of their techniques is a red herring.

In my opinion there seems to be a "conspiracy" against Melba and the research of "undocumented forest people" for some reason.

That says it all. Here we have a fan boy who sets aside deductive reasoning in order to defend what he 'believes' (rather than 'knows') to be true. For example...

Just remember this...Q30 proves the science is correct and exact... a slam dunk for Melba Ketchum

In a word 'no'. All he has done is verify what Q30 standards involve - not that the samples were subject to that standard. Supposedly finding dog, cat and bear DNA via GenBlast would suggest that something is amiss.

Of course, allowing other scientists to independantly handle and test samples would put the matter to rest. As would inviting researchers to observe these supposedly habituated BF, film them and collect their own samples.

So far it looks like this is unlikely to happen. We will have to wait and see and be wary of any information for which MK is the only source.

Latest news relating to the Breaking Bio video: via Cryptomundo.

Hi All – this is Anna Nekaris – I don’t post here often but this is an important video about the Melba Ketchum paper – I have said I would write a statement about all that is wrong with the paper, as there is not much that is right, but this nice bearded guy from New Zealand says it all. If you ignore the irritating people laughing and taking the piss, he is spot on with EVERYTHING…it is very thoughtful in fact. It is a shame they are actually so frivolous…as it might put you off. I actually fast forwarded to ten minutes in. He speaks relatively laymen. If you still have any questions about what BLAST or GenBank or over-representation of a chromosome or why it is relevant that we only have ever sequenced the genome of a panda, you can ask, as they are all certainly relevant aspects…and easy to explain….and the bearded chappy helps you along to explain why Melba and colleagues have got it is oh-so-wrong…

Dr. Anna Nekaris

Please note that Nekaris is a primatologist who is sympathetic to BF research and a member of Meldrum's Relict Hominoid Inquiry. She has also carried out her own research testing the DNA of samples purported to have come from unknown primates (orang pendek I think?) - so she should know what she is talking about.

If CM comes back and doesn't see an issue with the Lemur claims, or the complete lack of non-human hominid DNA, then I probably will jack it in.

I should point out that I do appreciate that MK isn't saying BF a product of humans mating with giant lemurs. However there shouldn't be any lemur markers whatsoever.

This latest fiasco makes it look more and more like MK is trying to force the data to fit her preconceptions.

Christ, how I would love to see those Breaking-bio smug fucks proved wrong...

The nice bearded Kiwi was actually ok. The others were smug fucks...

The piss-taking wasn't really called for (not exactly unexpected though), but the criticisms of the paper do appear to be valid. Reading comments made by the participants, they do say that they wouldn't have derided the paper if it hadn't been so terribly flawed.

What I don't understand is why MK keeps twisting and squirming to try and make the evidence fit her beliefs - that's just bad science. Anyone else would have taken a step back and said to themselves 'why don't these results make sense and how did this get screwed up?'.

If you have bad data, you try and find out why that is the case. You don't invent an unknown, unrecorded and implausible species of lemur because you will not entertain the idea that you made a mistake, or that your samples were contaminated.

However there shouldn't be any lemur markers whatsoever.

Really you know for a fact their shouldn't be any Lemur markers?
Yes if it was North American Bear of course their wouldn't be. But care to explain how you know 100% why no lemur marker should be found?

CMcMillan wrote:But care to explain how you know 100% why no lemur marker should be found?

If as MK claims, BF is a new form of hominin the presence of Lemur markers would be completely unprecedented as they are not found in other hominin or hominid.

But this is where MK shows how muddled she is. Whilst claiming that BF is a relict hominin the nDNA from here samples contains no hominin markers. Care to explain how MK's BF can be a new form of hominin when it's has 0% nDNA from any Hominins or Hominids?

If there is 0% hominin or hominid nDNA then the samples cannot come from a species that is related to the family hominidae in any way. That would make it practically impossible for hybridisation to occur and any hybrids would almost certainly be infertile.

It's clear that Ketchum wants BF to be a hominin and is willing to invent taxonomy, overlook impossible DNA configurations and signs of contamination in order to justify her claims. It beggars belief that you cannot see this and don't find MK's results and conduct extremely troubling and unscientific.

So you didn;t answer my question.
You have said your not a scientist.
So how do you 100% sure that a creature didn't evolve much like humans from and ancient Lemur line and at one time in that line they were able to reproduce with Humans?
So again you can't verify or back up the statement you make with 100% accuracy.

Now people have described Bigfoots having eye shine.

Most lemurs have retained the tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer of tissue in the eye, which is found in many vertebrates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemur

so this actually could make sense.

CMcMillan wrote:So how do you 100% sure that a creature didn't evolve much like humans from and ancient Lemur line and at one time in that line they were able to reproduce with Humans?

I didn't say I was 100% sure of anything. I never have and never will.

Obviously you cannot rule out the possibility that such a creature exists/existed, but within the bounds of current wisdom it makes no sense. So, despite being a remote possibility (despite there being no supporting evidence outside Ketchum's interpretation of suspicious DNA samples) it remains highly implausible.

It's also possible that aliens set up an experiment on Earth 15,000 BCE and created a chimera from various different species (including lemur). But how plausible is that hypothesis?

CMcMillan wrote:Now people have described Bigfoots having eye shine.

Most lemurs have retained the tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer of tissue in the eye, which is found in many vertebrates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemur

so this actually could make sense.

It only makes sense if you ignore the fact that you are trying to make the evidence fit preconceived beliefs. In terms of what we know about human evolution, the fossil record, genetic compatibility, the lack of a lemur population in the US etc. etc. etc. it makes no sense whatsoever.

So explain HOW she got Lemur in the DNA?
Even if you say it is contaminated how is it contaminated with Lemur in the US since as you say NO LEMURS in the us?

There are lots of options.

The DNA could come from an escaped pet or an escapee from a zoo. MK may have misinterpreted the sequencing (no one else has found lemur sequencing). The lemur result could be down to the same issues that created the panda result.

More to the point, why does MK blindly accept these supposed results and invent a whole new branch of evolution rather than question her data?

Even if this lemur hypothesis isn't pure fiction, where are the other US lemurs? You wouldn't get just one lemur species - divergence and adaptation to various environments woud result in a variety of species evolving in the US (probably even more varied than those species found in Madagascar).

We should also be able to trace a migration of various lemur species out of Africa and making their way to the US. If this migration occurred we should have as much evidence for it as the human migration out of Africa. We don't and it speaks volumes that you do not see this is a big problem.

You really don't understand the concept do you?
The Lemur of past mated with a human then those creatures and humans came across the land bridge.
So doesn't mean Lemurs came. Not that hard to believe.

Just so you Know stank

This post was made by MrBigfoot who is currently on your ignore list. Hide the message.

Still have you on Ignore

CMcMillan wrote:You really don't understand the concept do you?
The Lemur of past mated with a human then those creatures and humans came across the land bridge.
So doesn't mean Lemurs came. Not that hard to believe.

I appreciate that MK is suggesting a new family of lemurs. Do you understand the implications and lack of evidence?

Do you appreciate the fact that there is no evidence that any lemur species has migrated to mainland Africa, let alone the US?

Do you know the difference between 'believing' and 'knowing'?

Oh man, I just got around to watching the Ketchum interview video where she brings up the subject of lemurs. In one part she says that the male progenitor was an "unknown hominin" which is "closely related to humans" and soon after she says the closest match is a lemur and that it was "definitely not an ape." That's ... mind boggling. Hominins are apes (by definition) and lemurs may be primates but they're definitely not closely related to humans. If the male progenitor was a hominin then it can't have been a lemu, and if it was closely related to humans then it must have been an ape. She directly contradicts herself. I can only guess that she doesn't understand what those words mean.

I should also note that a lemur/hominin hybrid is technically possible since interfamilial hybrids are incredibly rare but not completely unknown. However the two species would be so biologically diverse that the hybrid offspring would be sterile and hybrid speciation (ie: the creation of a human/lemur Sasquatch species) just isn't feasible. If Ketchum thinks that it is possible then she's got a heck of a lot of research to perform if she wants to be taken seriously seriously. Since she just threw it out there with no explanation then she deserves all the ridicule that's inevitably coming her way. If she doesn't have any other empirical evidence to support this hypothesis then it's a dumb idea.

Even if speciation was somehow possible there's also the problem that there weren't any homo species anywhere near any lemuriform species 15,000 years ago. The evolutionary ancestors of lemurs first appeared in Africa about 65 million years ago and somehow rafted across to Magagascar which had been separated from every other land mass about 80 million years ago. The earliest homins discovered in Africa are from a period at least 60 millions years after the last lemur ancestors died out on that continent, and the only known time that lemurs encountered hominins was about 2000 years ago when modern humans reached Madagascar. If she wants to claim that the recently extinct Archaeoindris giant lemur came into contact with homo sapiens 15,000 years ago then once again she needs to do a heck of a lot of research to make that hypothesis sound even the slightest bit plausible. (She'd then need to explain how the new Bigfoot species managed to travel from Africa to Asia, North America, Australia and Indonesia.)


So. Her incredibly unlikely human/lemur hybrid hypothesis rests on several other hypotheses that are also incredibly unlikely and are all completely unsupported by any empirical evidence except (possibly) Ketchum's Sasquatch genome paper, which is currently under dispute.

Woodwose wrote:Do you appreciate the fact that there is no evidence that any lemur species has migrated to mainland Africa, let alone the US?

Do you know the difference between 'believing' and 'knowing'?

Can you appreciate the fact that we have very little evidence because the process we use as proof is extremely limited?

Organisms are only rarely preserved as fossils in the best of circumstances, and only a fraction of such fossils have been discovered. This is illustrated by the fact that the number of species known through the fossil record is less than 5% of the number of known living species, suggesting that the number of species known through fossils must be far less than 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Because of the specialized and rare circumstances required for a biological structure to fossilize, only a small percentage of life-forms can be expected to be represented in discoveries, and each discovery represents only a snapshot of the process of evolution.

DPinkerton wrote:Can you appreciate the fact that we have very little evidence because the process we use as proof is extremely limited?

We know that lemurs evolved in Madagascar and we know that the island has been separated from every other land mass since before they evolved. The hypothesis "Giant lemurs migrated to Africa and then North America" doesn't make sense since there was no way for them to get to Africa. (If there'd been a land bridge formed between Madagascar and mainland Africa in the last 60 million years then the African animals would have come across and wiped out most of the animals on Madagascar. It's clearly apparent that Madagascar has been isolated from Africa for tens of millions of years.) The alternate hypothesis "Homeo sapiens travelled to Madagascar during the Pleistocene era and mated with giant lemurs and the resulting offspring migrated to Africa and then North America" also doesn't make any sense for the same reasons - there's no way the Sasquatches could have left Madagascar. The fact that the fossil record is incomplete doesn't make those hypotheses any more sensical.

The hypothesis "A human female mated with a giant lemur 15,000 years ago" is a bad hypothesis. If Ketchum is finding lemur markers in her Sasquatch genome then she needs to find a different hypothesis to explain it.

DPinkerton wrote:Can you appreciate the fact that we have very little evidence because the process we use as proof is extremely limited?

And despite those limitations we have abundant evidence for the evolution of humans and our migration out of Africa.

There is no evidence for a similar lemur migration or a lemur species evolving to become analogous with the family Hominidae.

We know that lemurs evolved in Madagascar and we know that the island has been separated from every other land mass since before they evolved. The hypothesis "Giant lemurs migrated to Africa and then North America"

You are thinking that the hybrid and the mating of this took place in North America. No one said it did.
Also their is debate from Scientists that Lemurs did not Evolve in what is now known has Madagascar they did what is called rafting to the islands.
But that was easy to look up on the wiki associated on Lemurs.

Yes, lemurs (or rather their ancestors) are thought to have rafted to Madagascar. After that point there is no evidence of their ancestors surviving in Africa or Lemurs rafting back to Africa. And there is certainly no evidence of lemurs migrating out of Africa to the US - they would have left a trail of DNA and fossil evidence across Eurasia.

Do you understand what 'no evidence' means?

What next? Are you going to link all this back to the the 'I Am' cult that coined the term Bigfoot* and claimed that it belongs to a surviving race from the discredited and mythological continent of Lemuria?

*Source: M. Jessup, The UFO Annual, Citadel Press 1956 (p325-326).

Woodwose wrote:

DPinkerton wrote:Can you appreciate the fact that we have very little evidence because the process we use as proof is extremely limited?

And despite those limitations we have abundant evidence for the evolution of humans and our migration out of Africa.

There is no evidence for a similar lemur migration or a lemur species evolving to become analogous with the family Hominidae.

I was not speaking of lemurs...i was speaking to the overwhelming need for science to prove things with fossil records despite their own understanding of how minimal the fossil records are. "We need a fossil to prove XX and yet we know that fossils will only every show us 1% of the creatures that lived. Forget the other 99% and the thousands of gaps we have in our understanding."

Giant lemur mating with human females...I suspect not. Are they both primates...yes. But for science to say they "know" anything while still claiming they have only seen 1% of it is no better than sheer speculation.