The Ketchum Report (Continued)

[Guest]

MK failed. The end.

Agreed.

[Guest]

RR,

I have 2 questions/ points here. perhaps you or someone else can elaborate.

[stuff clipped)

The hair samples with non-human morphology but testing positive for human mtDNA are the most interesting samples. To my knowledge, no nuDNA sequence was generated from these samples.

Ok, I have spent a good deal of time trying to get a handle on this hair morphology. As far as i can tell there doesn't seem to be much in the way of blind tests of the ability of an "expert" to identify human vrs non human hair. I read about and see pictures talking about how human hair does not have a medula, but I pulled hair out of my head, photographed it under my microscope, and my hair certainly has a medula, so does that make me non human? Also I can take 2 photographs of the same strand of hair, and if i am fiocusing on scale pattern, you see no evidence of any medula, but if you focus down through the hair, the medula appears as it gets into clear focus range, so i wonder how all of that fits together with all of this hair morphology analysis. (I do have a pretty sophisticated scope and imaging system, 50 K worth, so it is pretty capapble) i have looked at and photographed 5 different hair samples, all supposed to be bigfoot, but so far, 3 seem to be completely human to me. 2 others look most like horse hair, from the tail (which looks different from the mane hairs, which look different from the body hairs, which look different from the bristles around the mouth.

There is a peer reviewed paper floating around out there that discusses finding at least 7 morphologically different hair "types" from a single bear, depending on where the sample comes from on the body. The more I look into hair morphology, and those who claim to be experts, and their unwillingness to be tested in their abilities, well, I just think it's a whole lot more complicated, and more ambiguous that many would want us to believe.

As championed by SY, analysis of the Y chromosome (if present), would be the most concrete evidence to get from these samples as it would be the most like the original parental contributor if the hybrid theory (that they are/were able to mate with modern Hss to produce viable, fertile offspring) is correct.

So I have been told repeatedly that MK has 3 whole genomes, 3 terrabytes of data. why not just pull the Y chromo out of that genome and look at it? that would immediately resolve the male highbrid hypothesis put forward by MK, would it not? why is she fooling around with a partial chromo 11, when she has the Y chromo just sitting there in her data?

I suspect that is a question SY ought to be able to get an aswer too, as he apparently communicates with MK on a regular basis.

SS

Edited April 25, 2013 by slowstepper

[masterbarber]

I think the problem here is obvious to those that will admit it. I don't care about the credentials. They only matter because Dr. Ketchum said anyone that isn't a geneticist can't comment, yet everyone that comments in support hasn't been a geneticist. It's a double standard.

But that's only one issue. The major problem is they're saying the data is good, but not giving an explanation why. If you say it's showing this or that, then you can't just leave out the why or how. It doesn't matter if you're a secretary, a janitor or a geneticist, I'd listen to anything or anyone that came out in support if they could backup the how with evidence.

So while some like to believe there's some conspiracy to make things look bad, the simple explanation is there has been absolutely zero attempts by anyone to backup why the science is good besides saying "Because it is." That is what makes it look bad.

^ Word

[georgerm]

SEE MY REPLIES IN BOLD BELOW:

RR,

I have 2 questions/ points here. perhaps you or someone else can elaborate.

[stuff clipped)

The hair samples with non-human morphology but testing positive for human mtDNA are the most interesting samples. To my knowledge, no nuDNA sequence was generated from these samples.

DOES NONHUMAN MEAN BF?

Ok, I have spent a good deal of time trying to get a handle on this hair morphology. As far as i can tell there doesn't seem to be much in the way of blind tests of the ability of an "expert" to identify human vrs non human hair. I read about and see pictures talking about how human hair does not have a medula, but I pulled hair out of my head, photographed it under my microscope, and my hair certainly has a medula, so does that make me non human? Also I can take 2 photographs of the same strand of hair, and if i am fiocusing on scale pattern, you see no evidence of any medula, but if you focus down through the hair, the medula appears as it gets into clear focus range, so i wonder how all of that fits together with all of this hair morphology analysis. (I do have a pretty sophisticated scope and imaging system, 50 K worth, so it is pretty capapble) NICE WORK

i have looked at and photographed 5 different hair samples, all supposed to be bigfoot, but so far, 3 seem to be completely human to me. 2 others look most like horse hair, from the tail (which looks different from the mane hairs, which look different from the body hairs, which look different from the bristles around the mouth. ANOTHER ISSUE...............HARD TO PROVE BF AGAIN

There is a peer reviewed paper floating around out there that discusses finding at least 7 morphologically different hair "types" from a single bear, depending on where the sample comes from on the body. The more I look into hair morphology, and those who claim to be experts, and their unwillingness to be tested in their abilities, well, I just think it's a whole lot more complicated, and more ambiguous that many would want us to believe.

As championed by SY, analysis of the Y chromosome (if present), would be the most concrete evidence to get from these samples as it would be the most like the original parental contributor if the hybrid theory (that they are/were able to mate with modern Hss to produce viable, fertile offspring) is correct.

So I have been told repeatedly that MK has 3 whole genomes, 3 terrabytes of data. why not just pull the Y chromo out of that genome and look at it? that would immediately resolve the male highbrid hypothesis put forward by MK, would it not? why is she fooling around with a partial chromo 11, when she has the Y chromo just sitting there in her data? WHY NOT PUT ALL 3 TERRABYTES IN THE PAPER?

I suspect that is a question SY ought to be able to get an aswer too, as he apparently communicates with MK on a regular basis.

SS

SO WHAT ABOUT BF HAIR?

Edited April 25, 2013 by georgerm

[Guest]

SS,

I don't have ANY experience on hair samples so I am totally deferring to others expertise when they say it is not human. Thanks for sharing your analysis. You are right about selecting the plain of focus. But to throw this out there, IF BF is in the Homo genus, does it have to have non-human like hair? Perhaps this is an assumption we need to think about.

With regard to the Y chromosome, if the samples came from a male, it would be present in the mix of raw sequence. I don't know if MK is looking at more of her data. If it were released, others could analyze it - but that would take the game out of her court and out of her control and would likely not support her conclusions. And any new findings would not be attributed to her other than referencing her for providing sequence.

In the end, the whole problem with the BF DNA study is we have two unknowns - no positively known BF samples AND no reference for BF DNA. Adding to the fact that it may be related to humans and the samples are being collected by humans, this put suspicion on human sequences as potential contamination. And given that the samples collected in the wild are going to have been exposed to UV and the elements, and some have been stored for years, this makes the DNA quality likely poor at the onset. Without a BF body, this was never going to be an easy job.

[Guest]

Slowstepper said:

Ok, I have spent a good deal of time trying to get a handle on this hair morphology. As far as i can tell there doesn't seem to be much in the way of blind tests of the ability of an "expert" to identify human vrs non human hair. I read about and see pictures talking about how human hair does not have a medula, but I pulled hair out of my head, photographed it under my microscope, and my hair certainly has a medula, so does that make me non human? Also I can take 2 photographs of the same strand of hair, and if i am fiocusing on scale pattern, you see no evidence of any medula, but if you focus down through the hair, the medula appears as it gets into clear focus range, so i wonder how all of that fits together with all of this hair morphology analysis. (I do have a pretty sophisticated scope and imaging system, 50 K worth, so it is pretty capapble) i have looked at and photographed 5 different hair samples, all supposed to be bigfoot, but so far, 3 seem to be completely human to me. 2 others look most like horse hair, from the tail (which looks different from the mane hairs, which look different from the body hairs, which look different from the bristles around the mouth.

I am not an expert in anything, especially when it comes to analysis of anything biological - period. But you said something I find very interesting.

To my knowledge - I would say probably 99.9% of the hair samples collected to date have been from a collection - not directly from a body. Collection of hair samples are usually because the alleged hair has been found after an alleged sighting in a location near the site of the alleged sighting. There is the Janice Carter story of yanking hairs from Fox but I'm not going to go there. But until you posted this slowstepper, I had never even considered the area of the body, where the hair was collected, could even be an issue. IF there is an alleged hair sample out there, and the collector of the sample knows what part of the body it came from (other than Janice Carter) that would be news to me.

If those who claim Bigfoot is close to us are correct - then what you're saying is a bit of information that is actually pretty important.

[Guest]

MK failed. The end.

Epic fail.

[southernyahoo]

RR,

I have 2 questions/ points here. perhaps you or someone else can elaborate.

[stuff clipped)

The hair samples with non-human morphology but testing positive for human mtDNA are the most interesting samples. To my knowledge, no nuDNA sequence was generated from these samples.

Ok, I have spent a good deal of time trying to get a handle on this hair morphology. As far as i can tell there doesn't seem to be much in the way of blind tests of the ability of an "expert" to identify human vrs non human hair. I read about and see pictures talking about how human hair does not have a medula, but I pulled hair out of my head, photographed it under my microscope, and my hair certainly has a medula, so does that make me non human? Also I can take 2 photographs of the same strand of hair, and if i am fiocusing on scale pattern, you see no evidence of any medula, but if you focus down through the hair, the medula appears as it gets into clear focus range, so i wonder how all of that fits together with all of this hair morphology analysis. (I do have a pretty sophisticated scope and imaging system, 50 K worth, so it is pretty capapble) i have looked at and photographed 5 different hair samples, all supposed to be bigfoot, but so far, 3 seem to be completely human to me. 2 others look most like horse hair, from the tail (which looks different from the mane hairs, which look different from the body hairs, which look different from the bristles around the mouth.

There is a peer reviewed paper floating around out there that discusses finding at least 7 morphologically different hair "types" from a single bear, depending on where the sample comes from on the body. The more I look into hair morphology, and those who claim to be experts, and their unwillingness to be tested in their abilities, well, I just think it's a whole lot more complicated, and more ambiguous that many would want us to believe.

As championed by SY, analysis of the Y chromosome (if present), would be the most concrete evidence to get from these samples as it would be the most like the original parental contributor if the hybrid theory (that they are/were able to mate with modern Hss to produce viable, fertile offspring) is correct.

So I have been told repeatedly that MK has 3 whole genomes, 3 terrabytes of data. why not just pull the Y chromo out of that genome and look at it? that would immediately resolve the male highbrid hypothesis put forward by MK, would it not? why is she fooling around with a partial chromo 11, when she has the Y chromo just sitting there in her data?

I suspect that is a question SY ought to be able to get an aswer too, as he apparently communicates with MK on a regular basis.

SS

SS, glad to hear you are looking into the hair morphology thing. I think it can be informative, but entirely exacting it probably isn't. I would like to see the micrographs of the various Bear hair morphologies. Human head hairs are suppose to be without a medulla or only traces visible except in the mongoloid race. Other body hairs from humans do have a medulla and commonly described as continuous and amorphous with an index not geater than 1/3 of the hair's total width. Arm hairs from a caucasian like myself only shows minor traces of a medulla. Total gross morphology is to be considered also, hair length, wave presence of cut ends etc.

We discussed the Y chromosome thing some time back as I recall. Mk's data seems to be hit and miss there as well, with human , unknown, and minor mutations comingled with sequencing failures.

[Guest]

The hair question is very important. I have seen purported samples in person - baby fine. Yet others report that it is course.

The guy who studied the samples submitted to the study is David Spence and his lab is noted in the paper. I don't see anything wrong with contacting him with questions. Granted, since he was said to be paid to do this work for Ketchum and will likely say he is unable to comment on HER project, that doesn't mean that he could not address hair analysis IN GENERAL. And the terms of her NDA specifically release one to discuss information that has already been made public, so unless he signed some other document, he should be free to talk. Then again, it's my understanding that he was only to identify "unknown" hairs, so he might not be helpful at all.

[Guest]

Good point Cornelius. I should have written...

 

 

MK failed in epic fashion. The end.

 

 

Thanks!

[Guest]

So many misconceptions here. You can't claim a match with 100 bp sequences. You get what you got, ridgerunner: matches to things that are very distantly related genetically. Ailuropoda melanoleuca is a PANDA (did you check?), not even a true bear and not found in the wild in the US. True proof of homology usually involves thousands of bp in sequences.

Of course Family Tree DNA does haplogroup analysis. Check their website. Most of their customers wouldn't know what to do with a raw sequence or even a list of mutations(which they also do provide). A BLAST search does not produce a haplogroup as output. BLAST was used for the nDNA sequences.

There were only 30 samples that provided enough mtDNA for a haplogroup analysis, the remainder of the 111 did not. Read the paper.

Do some homework, people.

[Guest OntarioSquatch]

Anybody who has done their homework wouldn't take this study seriously.

[georgerm]

So many misconceptions here. You can't claim a match with 100 bp sequences. You get what you got, ridgerunner: matches to things that are very distantly related genetically. Ailuropoda melanoleuca is a PANDA (did you check?), not even a true bear and not found in the wild in the US. True proof of homology usually involves thousands of bp in sequences.

Of course Family Tree DNA does haplogroup analysis. Check their website. Most of their customers wouldn't know what to do with a raw sequence or even a list of mutations(which they also do provide). A BLAST search does not produce a haplogroup as output. BLAST was used for the nDNA sequences.

There were only 30 samples that provided enough mtDNA for a haplogroup analysis, the remainder of the 111 did not. Read the paper.

Do some homework, people.

 

 

 

What's your opinion of MK's paper?  Can she improve it at this stage?

[Guest]

georgerm and others,

To answer your question and open up discussion, I have transferred my extensive review, which I sent to Dr. Ketchum, to my facebook page. Some of the formatting was lost, but it's readable. Also there I offer to send my Word file and the attachments to anyone. Please be as critical as you like. I don't claim to be the last word. Reading this and, of course, the original Ketchum article is much better use of your time than speculation about our credentials. We both admit(she to me, me to you) to not being geneticists. But Einstein was a patent clerk when he discovered the theory of relativity(not that I claim to be anywhere near as brilliant or that anything I do is anywhere near as important).

Hope to hear from you all,

Sincerely,

Haskell Hart

[southernyahoo]

Interesting review Haskell, and welcome to the Forum..

 

I wonder how it was ever determined that Neanderthal and Denisovans contributed small amounts of nuclear DNA to modern humans if that isn't in the data bases for confirmation. Also, we wouldn't know if extant Neanderthals or Denisovans still walked the earth if contemporary samples can't be compared to them. I'm referring to the nuDNA here and not the mtDNA. The Homology term comes up a lot in the review and I think it may be misused in the paper when trying to intimate the absence of specific mutations known to be from Neanderthals, Denisovans and other primates. Just speculation on my part.