Guest craichead Posted July 28, 2012 Share Posted July 28, 2012 Did she say there were 10 more PhDs? Was that a while ago or more recently? I don't recall that. GK Yes I believe she stated that on her FB page though it may have been on the one that's now defunct. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest gerrykleier Posted July 29, 2012 Share Posted July 29, 2012 Drew Stearns: "Will there be a press conference unveiling the findings?" https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Melba Ketchum: "As with most published scientific papers, there will be a press release first before anything else happens." https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Bruce MacDonald: "Let there be light...." https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Melba Ketchum: "More like an atomic bomb! LOL However, a little more patience is still required." https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Mitchell Waite: "This is just an open question for any or all. After the release of data, is there any group or being formed to study the social sturctures, habits, feeding and birthing of the Bigfoot? Kind of like a Jane Goodall effort?" https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Melba Ketchum: "@ Mitchell, there will be such an effort, you can contact Sally Ramey about this." https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Paul Graves: "Thank you Melba , and to address Mitchell"s question ,"The Olympic Project " is in the process of completing our mission statement and part of our effort is exactly what your question was ,and we are in part approaching it with a Jane Goodall kind of approach , species identification and continued education and learning are two of our main core values , as well as some kind of protection law from humans harming or killing one , we have some great positive people on our team , and are all excited to continue to learn about our close relatives and in return maybe learn something more about ourselves for the better of all mankind ..." https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Melba Ketchum: "@ Paul As I told Derek, we already have a well established Protection Group just waiting for the publication in order to go to their lawmakers to seek protection for the Sasquatch. We also have established a research initiative. I would like to invite the Olympic Project to work with us on this very important work. Sally Ramey is handling questions from folks about how to join and what they can do to help. We have had overwhelming success with this and I am very proud of all of the hard work that the group has done and how well they are working together. It will be a roaring success at the rate it is going. You guys that are on here that have been working tirelessly to get ready to launch, I am so proud of you and your commitment to this cause." https://www.facebook...tal_comments=44 Good thing you are keeping a record of all this! GK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 29, 2012 Share Posted July 29, 2012 (edited) It takes a statistical algorithm to get the gene sequence, then depending on what segment is looked at, the statistical significance of how close it is to X, Y, or Z. http://lmgtfy.com/?q...ic+research%3F+ That's all well and good, BUT that doesn't imply any sort of amiguity or uncertainty in the result, which is what is often inferred when people start talking about statistical matters. Reduced to it's essence, you take the gene, sequence it, and compare it to other known sequences. You then count the similarities. Write the report. Simple, clean, and definitive. It's the type of math a high-schooler should be able to do with a calculator or even longhand on paper. There is nothing to "interpret" or "infer" or "suppose", which is where the Skeptics try for their wiggle room to dismiss the findings. Exactly Cervelo, it is not as simple as laying out a string of beads and picking which ones are a match or don't match. In essence, it is. Gene sequences are basically just that, a string of beads in terms of how you count them. Let's say you have a string of 10 beads of four colors:red, blue, yellow, green. (Or in genetics terms A, T, G, C) Your study samples come back RRBBYYGRRB. This result is unique, matching no other sample on record. Thus a new species is dispositively identified (a brand new critter to the catalogue). Take your results and compare to various known critters, you eliminate everything but primates and narrow it down based on match/no match to the following (matches in bold, non-matches italics): RRBBYYGRRB (study sample) RRBBRYGRGY(Human) [7/10 match] BBRRYRBYRB(Chimpanzee) [3/10 MATCH] Write your report documenting the findings. You have a) conclusively proved a new critter, and b ) documented it is 70% similar to humans and 30% similar to chimpanzees genetically. Simple, easy to understand, and definitive. Nothing to "interpret" or "infer" or "apply". Edited July 29, 2012 by Mulder Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 29, 2012 Share Posted July 29, 2012 I don't think you understand how BLAST works Mulder, here is a snippet from a very good article that has a basic explanation of BLAST utilities: What you cannot get out of BLAST Don't expect BLAST to produce the best available alignment. BLAST is a heuristic method which does not guarantee the best results, and therefor you cannot rely on BLAST if you wish to find all the hits in the database. Instead, use the Smith-Waterman algorithm for obtaining the best possible local alignments [Smith and Waterman, 1981]. BLAST only makes local alignments. This means that a great but short hit in another sequence may not at all be related to the query sequence even though the sequences align well in a small region. It may be a domain or similar. It is always a good idea to be cautious of the material in the database. For instance, the sequences may be wrongly annotated; hypothetical proteins are often simple translations of a found ORF on a sequenced nucleotide sequence and may not represent a true protein. Don't expect to see the best result using the default settings. As described above, the settings should be adjusted according to the what kind of query sequence is used, and what kind of results you want. It is a good idea to perform the same BLAST search with different settings to get an idea of how they work. There is not a final answer on how to adjust the settings for your particular sequence. http://www.clcbio.com/index.php?id=995 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
southernyahoo Posted July 29, 2012 Share Posted July 29, 2012 ^ He may not and I may not, but whatever the method is used in matching sequences, if it is good enough to say you have a 100% match, then it is good enough to say you don't. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 ^And furthermore, if it's good enough to hold up in court to match samples in populations numbering in the billions and billions, it's good enough to conclusively establish a new species. And it DOES all the time...just not with Bigfoot, apparently... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 No, because bigfoot would be extraordinary as opposed to finding a new salamander. If what is being rumored is being done, it wasn't done by Melba, but the PhD's we are hearing about, and it would explain why it is taking a long time. The sequencing would not take so long, but the interpretation of the results, along with the retesting, would take time. More than likely they are writing the bulk of the paper. It needs to be right on target before you start annoucing to the world that their is an extant NA primate, and more than likely there will be disagreement about what that interpretation means just like you have with certain segments of the Neandertal DNA. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 (edited) One problem that is going to be tricky, and this may be a major concern for the research team and a big part in the delay: you find some alleles, not all, that are widely divergent from moderns (assuming hybridization, per the rumors). That in itself would be major news and very suggestive, but by itself doesn't equal Sasquatch. NonAfrican moderns have that divergent bit of Neandertal floating around in us, and, now, we find modern Africans with a similar kind of situation as seen in the article link by Shadowline above. Granted, if you found a divergence time of 2 million years or more (compared to the around 500,000 for our Neandertal alleles), every news outlet is going to jump to the obvious, and most likely, popular conclusion that this does indeed come from Sasquatch. For a scientifically valid quick answer it's probably going to have to come down to what percentage of the total genome is nonmodern. 70%? Yeah, you probably have a different kind of critter running around. 15%? Not so clear cut, at least at first. (Though, this would still attract enormous scientific interest - but a competing hypothesis could be the samples came from moderns who just haven't been sampled yet. It also matters what those particular nonmodern genes actually do - which again takes time to sort out.) This may have been a case of needing to sequence and compare dozens, then hundreds and then maybe thousands? of genes to get a better handle on that percentage value. Edited July 30, 2012 by tsiatkoVS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indiefoot Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 Maybe they had to wait for the entire genome to be sequenced? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 (edited) I wonder about that too, indiefoot. Or at least a really big, statistically significant chunk of it. I don't have a clue on how much money and time that would take nowadays. And it's not just the sequencing alone. They also would have to compare individual genes, one by one, (perhaps easy nowadays with computer libraries of numerous varieties of modern ones) and make sense of all that. Edited July 30, 2012 by tsiatkoVS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobZenor Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 (edited) Yeah, that's what makes commenting on the paper difficult. If sasquatch happens to be much closer to modern humans than seems likely but is certainly in realm of possibilities then the "proof" from the paper is going to mean much less and it would be a bit hard to swallow. Her enthusiasm makes me think there must be something very different in the DNA but we won't know until we see what she found. Edited July 30, 2012 by BobZenor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 (edited) I know what you are talking about, BobZ. The only saving grace is that it is hard to imagine a true half-and-half modern/sasquatch doing well in either's world very often, though at least one had to survive to have children within the sasquatch population if the hybridization rumor is true (and would be a female, if just the one). Get the wrong modern characteristics in you and you probably won't survive very long living as a sasq. One thing that will be interesting, if and when the paper comes out, is how similar the presumably continent wide samples will be to each other. Will the same genes be "sasquatch" and the same others always modern? So far, all of the mtDNA I've heard of is the modern outlier that Richard Substad mentioned. If so, then the hybridization probably happened a long time ago (also suggested by the outlier mtDNA ). The fairly consistent morphology and behavior reported for sasquatch, despite what Paulides hypothesizes, argues for this too. So, hopefully, the modern "noise" won't overwhelm the sasquatch signal. (Note: I'm assuming here that the "sasquatch" genes will be immediately recognized as nonmodern. If the "modern" genes in them are all pretty much the same for all sasquatches, then of course they are sasquatch genes too - they just can't be recognized as such unless associated with the nonmodern ones in one individual) And, yeah, Ketchum seems pretty confidant. Edited July 30, 2012 by tsiatkoVS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 FYI, the Genomics Core at my institution does whole genome sequencing, with 90%+ coverage of the genome. Takes about a week and costs $12K per sample. However, we typically send samples to a commercial laboratory that gives 100% coverage for $5K per sample, but takes over 4 weeks because their sample queue is large. GenesRUs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
southernyahoo Posted July 30, 2012 Share Posted July 30, 2012 How much genetic material does that require GenesRUs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bipedalist Posted July 31, 2012 BFF Patron Share Posted July 31, 2012 How long would focal testing for FOX2P, MCR1 take for example? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts