Nathaniel Jeanson’s Traced: Human DNA’s Big Surprise (2022, Master Books) offers virtually no surprises. This is not a science book. It is a work of fundamentalist religious propaganda dressed to appear scientific. Jeanson attempts to employ an analysis largely of his own invention on a narrow sampling of the human genome – extant Y-chromosome samples borrowed from other studies. These doctored genetic patterns are mapped onto historical events in an attempt to prove to the reader that all human beings are the descendants of the three sons of Noah – Shem, Japheth, and Ham. Jeanson’s views on world history are adolescent, Western-centric, and almost entirely focused on conflict and his science amateurish and divorced from any established methodology in molecular population genetics. In the end Jeanson, like all good science denialists, ends up ostensibly proving to the reader what he believed to begin with. Traced is a book working within his contractual obligations to his employer (the evangelical, conservative Christian ministry, Answers in Genesis) to promote a narrow, legalistic, literalist reading of the King James Bible and a Christian culture war agenda. It is not a science book. It is not a sober, informed historical account. It is a proselytizing work of pseudoscientific apologetics covered with a thin veil of carefully selected empiricism in an attempt to give his ideas the credibility he apparently craves.
A cumbersome read
First, let’s get this out of the way. The arrangement of Nathaniel Jeanson’s Traced is incredibly cumbersome. Nearly a third of the book is a series of color figures that have been collectively inserted into the middle of the book. These figures are everything from numerous genetic trees and maps to open-source photos of General Custer and Sitting Bull (color plate 172) and the Taj Mahal (color plate 112). Jeanson’s advice to the reader is…
“I recommend that, while you read the text, you keep a finger in the section containing the illustrations. That way you can easily move back and forth between the text and the color plates, and the conclusions will make more sense.” (pg. 15)
As many as eight or more citations on a single page of text may instruct the reader to flip to a color figure in the middle of the book. This makes the printed version of the book unwieldy, but I would imagine, make the Kindle version of the book all but unreadable (as other reviews have noted).
It is difficult to overstate what a cumbersome book this is to read. The publisher could not even be bothered to insert the massive collection of mostly unnecessary color figures between two chapters. There is no subject index. At other times a table appears out of nowhere with no descriptive legend and in one case printed sideways (see pages 165, 168, 178).
In this work, as in Jeanson’s previous book Replacing Darwin, he asks much of the reader. To extract the rationale for his arguments one must wade through poorly conceived figures and tables, flip to the back of the book to overly complex appendices to explain his reasoning, or worse must access additional articles Jeanson has published in the Answers in Genesis in-house journal.
The book is written for a reader who already knows Jeanson’s conclusion and agrees with his theology. It is not written as a compelling argument grounded on empirical evidence. I suspect few of the people who purchase this book will take the time to read it cover-to-cover. It is designed and marketed for a friendly audience of like-minded believers who really will not be overly concerned if it is poorly executed so long as the conclusion is aligned with what they want to believe.
A lot of the convoluted prose and arrangement of this book may be deliberate. Much of what Jeanson characterizes as “technical” is less technically complex and simply convoluted. This may be by design to impress an uninitiated reader who may confuse complexity with rigor and expertise.
Omissions
Now, as to the substance of Traced, a critical reader with even a modicum of knowledge of genetics or any trust in scientific inquiry and legitimate scientific institutions will be left in the lurch as much as a reader who expects a cohesive, well-organized book.
Confirmation bias – the tendency to prefer information that aligns with a priori beliefs – is a fundamental feature of conspiratorial thinking and science denialism. Confirmation bias is where special creationism lives. Creationists are so consumed with confirmation bias that is imbedded in their statements of faith.
With any book published under the auspices of Answers in Genesis this is perhaps the single most important consideration when weighing the credibility of the author’s claims. Anyone working for the Answers in Genesis organization is compelled to adhere to a Statement of Faith as a condition of their employment and among the beliefs they are required to affirm is the following.
“No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field of study, including science, history, and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture obtained by historical-grammatical interpretation.” – Statement of Faith, Answers in Genesis
Outside of a morbid curiosity for unraveling the delusions of others, like trying to understand why serious people still think the earth is flat, there is no need for any curious, thoughtful, rational person to read this book, but if you must keep Jeanson’s adherence to this statement of faith in mind throughout. He has agreed that there is no possible empirical data that would cause him to question his belief in a fundamentalist interpretation of a literal and inerrant Judeo-Christian Bible. None. He will only articulate arguments and present empirical evidence that confirms what he already believes, namely that the earth and the entirety of the universe are but a few thousand years old and that life originated in a miraculous bout of creation from which a single pair of human beings were produced, the Biblical Adam and Eve, and these two isolated individuals are the ancestors of all modern people.
As in Replacing Darwin, Jeanson refuses to acknowledge the mountains of evidence we have for an earth much older than the 6,000 or so years his theological convictions will allow. He barely mentions the decades-old fields of radiometric dating and dendrochronology which clearly refutes any notion of an earth a few thousand years old. As in Replacing Darwin what mention he may give of radiometric dating for example is a simple declarative statement or suggestion that he believes it to be inaccurate, but he never fully articulates the reason why or in any way offers any cogent argument against the thousands of scientific studies employing radiometric and other forms of dating.
In an obvious display of confirmation bias however he does slip up and cites radiometric dating as a source of evidence leading to the conclusion that indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin once engaged in extensive cultivation of maize (pg. 141). But yet, despite this nod to radiometric dating when it serves his purposes, he is dismissive of what he refers to as the “mainstream timescale” – a product of the “mainstream science” Jeanson disfavors (pgs. 64-65).
Jeanson makes virtually no mention of advances in ancient DNA sequencing – except perhaps in passing to dismiss it out of hand as inaccurate as he has done in his prior work. These dismissals however are baseless. He makes no effort to challenge the decades of careful science and scrutiny involved in ancient DNA sequencing. For that matter, I’m not sure if Jeanson has ever actually sequenced any of his own samples himself – outside perhaps some isolated gene pertinent to his completely unrelated research conducted as a graduate student.
Jeanson ignores the enormous utility of whole-genome sequencing and the wealth of information contained in genes other than those on the Y-chromosome. His reason for this lies in the claim that no useful information may be derived from autosomes (chromosomes other than the sex chromosomes or DNA contained in the mitochondria) because they undergo recombination. He is perhaps oblivious to the fact that recombination also takes place on segments of the Y-chromosome (significantly more than once thought). Or he ignores that fact because it does not serve his agenda. He is unaware that there are robust analytical tools for detecting recombination in autosomal genes. Or he ignores that fact because it does not add to his narrative. Jeanson seems to constantly look away from mountains of empirical evidence and entire fields of study if that evidence cannot be readily bent to serve his religious mission.
Jeanson throughout the book chastises science for not abandoning ideas in the face of conflicting evidence (e.g., pgs. 147-148), but when it comes to evidence that conflicts with his own conclusions the reader is left with the equivalent of a big “oh well” and he moves on with the narrative. Jeanson’s Y-chromosome analysis leads him to conclude that archaeological evidence for the Olmec predates the earliest, and absurdly young, dates he can produce for the First Peoples of the Americas. Rather than viewing this as a problem for his conclusion he shrugs it off and moves on boasting about how he is unphased by contradictory evidence and how science loves a mystery (pgs. 152-153). He disingenuously engages in this charade while just a few pages previously having the nerve to admonish “mainstream science” (all science to Jeanson seems to be either “mainstream” and mostly wrong or Christian and infallible) for corroborating genetic evidence against other fields of study as a “sanity check” (pg. 147). I suspect the last thing Jeanson would wish to subject himself to would be the sort of “sanity checks” demanded of “mainstream science” because doing so would compel him to do what sanity would require and deal with evidence he would rather ignore.
Mistakes
The science in Traced is, like that of his previous book, sloppy, contrived, and completely divorced from any semblance of rigorous methodology in the field of either history or population genetics. This should be no surprise. Jeanson has absolutely no training in these fields. His PhD never dealt with the subjects he is now researching at his job at the Answers in Genesis ministry. As I have observed in my assessment of Replacing Darwin, Jeanson appears to be making up methods as he goes and in doing so makes what I would consider embarrassing mistakes – mistakes easily avoided by taking the time to read even basic textbooks in the fields of molecular systematics and population genetics.
If Jeanson’s results were as iron clad and well-supported as he believes them to be he would have no problem submitting these manuscripts to the editors of Science and Nature. But he will not do that because I suspect he knows his work would never pass any critical review among experts in these disciplines. Indeed, I imagine most would look at such a submission with astonishment, and not in the good sense. The hallmark of a science denialist when confronted with the fact that their views are on the fringe and could never compete in a scientific arena are cries of conspiracy, and I suspect Jeanson is no different. The very distinction he draws between what he believes to be enlightened Christian science and “mainstream science” suggests he views scientific institutions with deep mistrust and sees the rejection of his ideas among the mainstream as a conspiratorial act of aggression.
Some topics Jeanson was wise to avoid this time. I had engaged in a public debate with Jeanson and pointed out that his supposed use of coalescent approaches was nothing of the sort. He seemed mostly clueless on that topic despite having brought it up as the basis for his analysis in Replacing Darwin. The term coalescent never seems to come up in Traced. It is as if he realized these methods, despite being an essential part of modern population genetics, were outside of his capabilities and he abandoned even lip service to these techniques.
Jeanson however engages in many of the same mistakes he has in the last book, namely playing fast and loose with mutation rates to give him the answers he wants from the data. He seems to still not grasp the difference between de novo mutation rates and neutral substitution rates – the latter being relevant to the molecular clock approaches he ostensibly says he is using, the former, less so.
Nor does Jeanson appear capable of recognizing even the most basic concepts in the interpretation of the bifurcating tree diagrams used to display genetic data. I recall videos of Jeanson on the Answers in Genesis YouTube channel attempting to explain his genetic trees in the context of the three sons of Noah. What he is doing is arbitrarily pointing to different clusters on the tree and claiming these are the ancestors that could be attributed to Noah’s male offspring. Jeanson seems very susceptible to pareidolia when viewing virtually any gene tree – easily imagining Biblical ancestors at the nodes.
In order to display historical information, trees need to be rooted. Typically, this means selecting another set of sequences that are related to the group of interest but not within that group. We call this outside group an outgroup and with humans we have a very well supported outgroup for our genus – chimpanzees. Doing what virtually every other scientist on the planet would find perfectly reasonable and justifiable Jeanson cannot do because doing so would in effect acknowledge a common ancestry between humans and non-human animals.
So what is he to do? There are other ways to root a tree but using an outgroup is the most straightforward way to draw historical inferences from a genetic tree. For Jeanson the goal is to prove all Y-chromosomes came from Noah through his three sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth. What he has decided to do is arbitrarily root the tree so that it looks as if there are three groups he may associate with Noah’s sons and then he proceeds to rationalize this arrangement after the fact. Like many of his methods, he has adopted naïve justifications for the way he chooses to root his trees.
In this case, he claims that the trees are rooted such that the branching pattern matches his expectations in regards to population growth and to make this comparison he adopts an erroneous assumption about trees (see the Answers in Genesis article from 2019 that Jeanson cites in Traced). A fully resolved branching tree diagram is bifurcating – one branch splits into two, each of those two into another two branches, and on and on as genes are replicated and accumulate differences. Jeanson seems to think that this branching pattern necessarily reflects population growth (pgs. 79-80). It does not. Bifurcating trees will still represent gene diversity even when a population is stable over time. It’s not as if a stable population – neither expanding nor contracting – will just forever have a single branch for every gene in perpetuity.
If Jeanson were truly interested in testing hypothesis about demographics and population dynamics he would explicitly use coalescent methods (as are used in many of the papers he cites while seemingly ignoring their techniques, e.g. Karmin et al. 2015. Genome Research, 25(4), 459-466). Unlike the very simplistic, and often inaccurate neighbor joining tree building approaches Jeanson uses, trees constructed using coalescent methods explicitly incorporate population size. Coalescent gene genealogies report branch lengths in coalescent units which are a function of population size. But alas Jeanson seems either unwilling or incapable of deploying these techniques and is mired in very simplistic, easy to implement methods upon which he layers rationalizations to support his case.
Counting branches on a tree generated from comparatively computationally simple distance methods is Jeanson’s proxy for estimating population size. This approach is simply wrong, but when it fails to give him the answers he wants and despite his accusations of evolutionists shifting goalposts, Jeanson himself rationalizes away any contradiction. When branches for African Y-chromosome haplotypes are too long for his liking he chalks it up to some unknown faster rate of mutation in the past (pg. 70, 172) – instead of considering the more sensible reason in light of all the other evidence that simply these branches are much older. In other instances to explain away some discordance between population size and the number of branches on a neighbor-joining tree he imagines there are extinct lineages that cannot be included and thus cause him to underestimate population size (pg. 96-97) – but he does this in some cases as it suits him but ignores this possibility in other cases.
He also confuses what it means to use the term effective population size, seemingly interpreting that term as referring to something akin to net population growth (pg. 96). That is not what effective population size means in population genetics. But all these mistakes will be entirely lost on his audience for this book – an audience with less understanding of population genetics than Jeanson but just as much motivation to believe someone telling them what they want to hear.
Historical and cultural context
Jennifer Raff has a new book out now on the peopling of the Americans (Raff. 2022. Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas. Twelve. Hachette Book Group. New York.) and like any good scientist should she addresses the problem from multiple disciplines from genetics to archaeology to anthropology. Reading Raff alongside Jeanson reveals how different their two worlds are. Raff is multidisciplinary and scholarly with a dual PhD in anthropology and genetics and a publication record in these disciplines commensurate with her professional experience. Jeanson’s attempts at answering questions about human history are almost entirely uninformed by any professional expertise in any relevant discipline, his methods are amateurish, he has no record of publishing in these fields, he ignores long-standing and well-established data. But perhaps the most striking difference is the great care and respect Raff takes when dealing with the history of people outside of her ethnic and cultural identity contrasted with the ham-handed way in which Jeanson deals with culture, ethnicity, and issues pertaining to race.
Jeanson’s approach to history reminds me of my own thoughts about human history as an adolescent boy – views of history that an appetite for knowledge and eventual experience with other cultures compelled me to outgrow pretty quickly. In Jeanson’s view of human history war is entirely central. Virtually every movement of people he describes is the result of violent conflict. Aggressors are everywhere and every geographical feature is either a fortification or invitation to invasion.
Jeanson is liberal with pejorative labels for entire cultures, sometimes with a wink enclosing these labels in quotations and sometimes not. He describes the people of Mongolia as “barbarians” and “…the long-standing enemies of China.” (using quotes to hopefully insulate the reader from thinking he thinks they are barbarians, pgs. 117-119). He paints simplistic descriptions of otherwise complex people using terms such as “primitive” (pgs. 159-160). He uses stereotypical tropes such as when he says, “The diverse peoples of East Asia all resemble one another.” (pg. 115).
The knowledge of history expressed in this book could only be referred to as encyclopedic in that it is summarized and comparatively brief. Jeanson devotes a scant four and a half pages to the Indian subcontinent and remarks about what a mystery it is and how he knew nothing about its cultural diversity or history until well into his adulthood remarking, “The name Ghandi rang a bell, but beyond that, I had no idea who past heads of state were”. (italics and spelling are from Jeanson, pg. 103).
Western culture is held in high regard throughout this book. Jeanson’s theory claims that Y-chromosome haplotype I reflects the first Europeans, and they were decidedly Greco-Roman (pgs. 98-99). I only wish Jeanson would have taken the time to read David Reich’s excellent book on human history titled Who We Are and How We Got Here (Reich 2018) which, because he has no religious convictions against using ancient DNA samples, lays out the evidence for the first Europeans being unrelated to any modern Europeans.
Despite some clumsy tropes about race and ethnicity (the remark about all Asians looking the same among the most blatant, pg. 115) I can’t say this is an overtly racist book – naïve about cultural and ethnic diversity but overtly racist, no. That said the young earth creationism that Ken Ham and Jeanson subscribe to has its roots in the work of Henry Morris and others who used the same genealogical arguments for all modern human diversity originating with the three sons of Noah to imbue races with very prejudiced, bigoted stereotypes.
Henry Morris in his 1977 book The Beginning of the World: A Scientific Study of Genesis I-II states,
“Often the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have become actual personal servants or even slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane matters, they were eventually displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites.” – Morris, The Beginning of the World: A Scientific Study of Genesis I-II
Morris continues to state the case more clearly that each of the lineages of the three sons of Noah, lineages Jeanson claims to have proven, shape the entirety of human diversity today and have “innate natures” and those natures are precisely in line with traditional white racist stereotypes…
“Neither Negroes nor any other Hamitic people were intended to be forcibly subjugated on the basis of this Noah declaration. The prophecy would be inevitably fulfilled because of the innate natures of the three genetic stocks, not by virtue of any artificial constraints imposed by man.” – Morris, The Beginning of the World: A Scientific Study of Genesis I-II
Jeanson is seemingly more charitable when it comes to attributing particular personality, cognitive, and moral characteristics to the descendants of the three sons of Noah, but he is playing a role in promoting beliefs about human history that have long been used to imbue people with racial stereotypes.
Jeanson tries and fails to incorporate some cultural evidence into his theory, namely linguistics. Somewhat astonishingly, he treats language as a fact of human society that is historical in nature (pg. 55-58). He claims for example that the Dravidian languages of South India originated in India (pg. 106) and uses this observation to bolster his narrative about the genetics of the peoples of India (pgs. 105-107) and makes similar claims for languages arising in situ in other populations around the globe. This is at odds with his literalist Biblical beliefs and he makes no meaningful effort to reconcile this contradiction. Remember the Judeo-Christian Bible has an origin story for languages as well – the Tower of Babel – and Jeanson is contractually obligated to view it as literal as he views the cosmological and biological creation stories in Genesis. In this story human languages are as ahistorical and as miraculous as the created kinds in the beginning of Genesis. He makes some attempt to clean this up later in the book (pgs. 181-184) but there is some narrative embedded in Traced that would deviate from a straightforward reading of the Bible regarding the origin of languages. I would be very curious to hear Ken Ham’s opinion of Jeanson’s suggestion that many languages originated over time and in situ around the world rather than as a the result of a single act of divine intervention.
Why write this book?
Jennifer Raff points out in Origin (2022) that Western colonialists in the Americas did not know what to make of indigenous peoples. Western religious institutions from the Catholic Church to the Church of Latter-Day Saints could not view native peoples as people unless they fit into their religious narrative. The 16th century Jesuit priest José de Acosta in his book Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias made the claim that the native peoples of the Americas must be the descendants of a Biblical Adam and Eve. Only when the Catholic Church deemed native Americans to be descendants of a Biblical Adam were they viewed as human beings, and therefore in need of conversion. They were seldom recognized as human beings in their own right (see Raff 2022, pgs. 11-12).
Jeanson is engaging in a similar exercise to the early Spanish colonialists trying to reconcile their theology and these new experiences with the full diversity of the human species. His religious affirmations demand an orderly world that bends to a literal Scripture and he makes every effort to see that this is how the world is presented. In that view the peoples of the world must fit within his religious beliefs.
Jeanson’s Traced is decidedly not a science book. Like all pseudoscience it is science in service of some agenda other than an understanding of the natural world. Traced is a religious narrative dressed as science to lend it credibility and disguise its fundamentalist underpinnings. It is an exercise in molding a presentation human history to affirm his beliefs.
At least compared to Replacing Darwin this work is somewhat more forthcoming in its goals. In previous interviews Jeanson has revealed his personal disgust for everything from homosexuality to premarital sex and expressed no small amount of disdain for people who accept the science of evolution saying, “evolution is a front for underlying moral issues”. Traced is in no way about science. It is about the imposition of a narrow set of fundamentalist religious views on a diverse and tolerant secular society that people like Jeanson and Ken Ham loathe.
At the end of Traced Jeanson removes the disguise of the curious, mystery-loving scientist he pretends to be to reveal the moralizing evangelical he is.
“Like Adam and Eve, we have rejected God’s commands, seeking to rule our own lives. In essence we have all lived as our own little gods, not in submission to the one true God, whose kingdom will never pass away. We have not acknowledged that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever he chooses.
As a result, all of us will one day lose the breath that God gave us. After death, God has promised an eternity of punishment in the fires of hell.
However, God has also made a way to escape this fate.
Jesus’ perfect life and substitutionary death is our way out.”
Everything Nathaniel Jeanson does under the umbrella of science is in service of these ultimately religious ends and imposing your beliefs in personal gods and inerrant religious texts and moralizing to people you barely know on the basis of whether they accept a scientific theory is not science. Jeanson and anyone else are welcome to these and whatever other religious beliefs they may hold so long as they don’t harm others in the name of those beliefs, coerce others to share their beliefs, or present those beliefs as something they are not. I believe creationists like Jeanson and Ham are guilty of the latter, presenting their ultimately religious convictions as something they are not – science – in order to further the former goals.