 Where I work, I'm around people smarter than I am all the time. I constantly fact-check my assertions, and I'm prepared to be wrong if the evidence goes against me. This is what it is to be a research scientist. We learn not to value our own intellects too highly. There's always someone smarter, more knowledgeable, or with data not yet published. Humility before the truth is a professional requirement. That holds true on YouTube as well. I'm not very well-read on certain topics, I'm politically adrift, and I don't know much history, philosophy, and I'm a mess with languages other than English. Even within my field, I frequently make mistakes, and I'm not ashamed when I do make one. I learn by listening, not by talking. I try not to have too much ego because it gets in the way of my education. Then, there's Nephilim Free. What can I say? He's the opposing end of the spectrum. He's the most ignorant person I've ever met. He's ignorant on purpose, which is doubly damned. What makes my skin crawl is that he's so very proud of his ignorance that he actually thinks he can bluff a professional scientist with incorrect usage of technical terms he doesn't understand, and can't even spell or pronounce correctly. Some of you may know the Dunning-Kruger effect. Named for the psychologist who first formally documented it, it refers to the tendency for relatively inexperienced people to overestimate their proficiency in a topic, usually to their detriment. A young driver overestimates their ability to navigate in traffic. A new pilot takes inappropriate risks in landing because they can't accurately assess their capabilities. And a freshman college student often believes they have a mastery of a field based on a single class. As experience progresses through mistaken correction, additional education, the initiate begins to understand the limits of their knowledge or experience. They become more cautious, more conservative, and more willing to adjust to new information. Part of education is to teach us how much more we have to learn. Ask a simple question like, what is a gene to a freshman biology student? And you get an immediate, very straightforward answer with a confident demeanor. A grad student would be more cautious, adding exceptions to rules. A full professor might need a nice cup of coffee, 45 minutes staring out the window, and a research grant to answer fully. Now, when I view Nephilim Freeze, a recent response to my video about him, I see an uneducated buffoon. He rants for about an hour and a half about my 17 minute video, and it would be painful to list all the places where he makes simple factual errors. It grates on my nerves because he's so painfully unconscious of his own mistakes. I know he'll never learn anything more on the topic because his own ego gets in the way of his education. He already knows everything. You really see it in the number of times he simply asserts something is true on his own authority, no citations, no supporting data. So rather than go through his video and identify every one of his mistakes, I'm just going to pick three clips where he is provably wrong in fact. I could choose any 32nd clip, but these are some of my favorites. Similarities in, say, for example, proteins from one kind of life don't provide evidence that that organism is related to another. 80% of the proteins in human beings are different from those of any ape. Where's your phylogenics related to molecular similarities there? You see, if human beings were closely related to apes by a common ancestor, instead of 80% of our proteins being different from any ape, we should have 80% exactly the same proteins. 80% of the human proteins should be found in apes, but that's the opposite of the truth. So you see, your idea is completely bogus. This is particularly stupid. He's referring to a paper in the journal Gene by a group at Penn State. The title is 80% of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees. Hey, if all you ever read was the title of the article, you might make the same leap old nephew is making. However, if you actually read the article, you'd see that they're saying that 80% of proteins differ by at least one amino acid between chimps and humans. In certain key proteins, like cell signaling components, 45% of the human proteins tested had an identical protein sequence to chimps. There is no way to tell them apart between chimp and human. If we allow for a 99% sequence match that is nearly identical, the number goes up to 53%. Why is anyone writing articles about a few amino acids different between chimp and human proteins? Because the DNA is an even closer match. Chimps have almost all the same genes that humans do, and the DNA for those proteins is almost identical, usually between 99% and 98% identical to human. But between chimps and humans, there are a surprising number of variations in protein sequence, suggesting that the small number of DNA differences are having a bigger impact, albeit small, on protein divergence. So, Nephi is vocalizing rectally here. He has no idea of the facts behind his assertion. He's never read the paper the figures come from, and he's hopeless on genomics. Up to 10% of your genome are the littered remains of failed retroviruses. Wow, you really pack in a lot of lies, don't you? I'm going to read something for you about the subject of retroviruses. What are claimed to be retroviruses in the DNA of human beings and other creatures, such as apes, which supposedly demonstrate ancestry between those phylum and various phylum is not viral at all. There are examples. Do you remember my MS-DOS programming code example? That's what they are. Elements of common design, nothing more. For example, the PTERV1, quote, retrovirus, is found in the rhesus monkey, olive baboons, and African great apes, but not in humans. This makes it clear that ERVs are not evidence of evolution, that they are actually evidence of a common designer. This one is hilarious. The PTERV he's talking about stands for pan-troglodides endogenous retrovirus. It appears to have infected chimpanzee four million years ago, about the same time the human line separated from the chimp line. There are about a hundred insertion sites found in chimps and some other apes, but not in humans. Why don't we have this ERV? Is it proof we're unrelated to chimps? Well, no. Humans possess a protein that specifically deactivates this ancient virus, called APOB EC3. It's a cytidine deaminase, similar in action to AIDS antiviral drugs. Chimps lack this gene, which makes them more resistant to lentiviruses, but more susceptible to certain other types of retrovirus. In short, we evolved defense mechanism that among the ape line was unique to the human. So, Nefi uncovered a really interesting anomaly, but rather than actually learning what scientists have discovered about it, he rushes to the wrong conclusions. Typical. In comparison to those in chimpanzee genome. The Human Genome Project has verified what evolution once called junk and retroviruses are not junk and not retroviruses. They're transposable elements that have specific function. If Nefi had taken my molecular biology class, he would have just received an F. Nefi has just said, cars are not cars, they're automobiles. Transposable elements, properly called transposons, are a general class that include class one, retro transposons, and class two, DNA transposons. Class one transposable elements include the endogenous retroviruses that he's dismissing. His first point was that the ERVs can't move around in the genome. Therefore, these sequences are actually jumping transposons. How do these sequences move? Well, they have a viral reverse transcriptase, viral promoters called LTRs, and sometimes even make weak or broken viral antigens. This is why I can't take him seriously. He has no idea what he's saying. So those are my three favorite moments of Nephilim-free self-ponage. I don't intend to waste any more time on him, but he's always good for a bit of a laugh. I'll leave you on one final note. Not only is he ignorant of biology and genetics, he also lacks any proficiency in spelling and lacks the technical know-how to use this recent innovation called spell check. Or perhaps I'm wrong and he wants to make sure that his creationist chorus can find his videos. I imagine they're doing keyword searches for frequent genetic phylogenics or phylogy, assuming they're also obtuse enough to believe that autism is a belief in odds. Thanks for watching.