Bob Wrong About Neanderthal DNA

Like Irl, I too had the misfortune to hear Bob's massacre of science today in an ongoing effort to claim that the Earth and the Universe are only a few thousand years old.

This is just a rehash of the same old bullshit. Bob repeated his lie about how radiometric dating of recently erupted volcanic rocks always yields an age in the millions of years, despite the scientific evidence, including this study of rocks from Mt. Vesuvius, which shows accurate dating of recent volcanic eruptions. The Mt. St. Helens "study" that Bob routinely mentions has also been thoroughly debunked.

But what caught my attention today was Bob's discussion of Neanderthal DNA:

"Even the evolutionists have been mapping the neanderthal genome. And guess what? So far, it's coming up identically human. ... Right now 99.5% human. And all humans alive today on the planet have a 1 degree variance in them, so the neanderthal genome is coming in right smack in the middle of the variances that exist among the human beings walking the Earth today."

First of all, like Irl mentioned, Bob doesn't give any sources for his assertions, such as the"99.5% human" figure or the "1 degree variance" issue. I guess we're just supposed to take his word for it. But that's a bad idea, because a recent scientific study of neanderthal DNA says just the opposite.

"A complete mitochondrial (mt) genome sequence was reconstructed from a 38,000 year-old Neandertal individual with 8341 mtDNA sequences identified among 4.8 Gb of DNA generated from ~0.3 g of bone. Analysis of the assembled sequence unequivocally establishes that the Neandertal mtDNA falls outside the variation of extant human mtDNAs, and allows an estimate of the divergence date between the two mtDNA lineages of 660,000 ± 140,000 years."

Folks, Bob is just making this stuff up as he goes along. He'll throw out some official sounding terms (e.g., 99.5 percent and 1 degree variance), but there's no actual facts or evidence to back it up. Remember, just because Bob says he uses "science, logic, and intellectual reasoning," doesn't mean he really does!