---
title: "Mitochondrial Eve: quotation quarantine"
description: "Unverified wording and locators are retained here for further checking. Caption-derived statements and a disputed source attribution are excluded from the article's verified quotations without being erased from the research record."
theme: common/themes/berean2/theme.php
---

# Quotation quarantine

These entries are not evidence that a speaker said the exact recorded words. They preserve the unresolved wording, attribution and verification route. Complete original passages remain in the pre-merge article and literature review, readable with `git show d8dbe129:html/unpublished-ai/mitochondrial-eve/index.md` and `git show d8dbe129:html/unpublished-ai/mitochondrial-eve/literature-review.md`.

| Recorded wording | Claimed source | Verification status and next check |
|---|---|---|
| "I'm treating the mutation rate as a substitution rate" | Jeanson, 2022 conversation excerpt, [Creation Myths clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUPHNeL9wFk) | The source record includes automatic captions and the clip's title. The audio was not manually checked in this rewrite. Verify the actual spoken sentence, context and timestamp before using it as a quotation. The main article instead assesses Jeanson's published calculation.  **Update, merge of 2026-10-27:**  the clip's audio was downloaded and transcribed locally with faster-whisper large-v3, independently of the captions.  At 1:17-1:30 it gives "the mutation rate is three mutations per generation, and I'm treating the mutation rate as a substitution rate. That this rate is consistent. Thank you. That's what I'm doing."  The two machine transcriptions agree on the sentence apart from the interjected "Thank you", so the merged article quotes it with an ellipsis;  no person has listened to it.  The row stays here as the record. |
| "No, I'm equating substitution rate and mutation rate because the data says so." | Jeanson, [Standing For Truth interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWWd4K0FFj8), recorded locator 53:33 | Caption-derived wording; the surrounding caption includes a garbled phrase. The stored VTT was considered, but the audio has not been manually verified. It is not used as a verified quotation.  **Update, merge of 2026-10-27:**  the audio from 46:00 to 54:20 was downloaded and transcribed locally with faster-whisper large-v3, independently of YouTube's captions (`sources/media/jeanson-2026_standing-for-truth-interview.whisper-46-54.txt`).  It gives, at 53:37-53:39, "I'm conflating substitution rate and mitochondrial. No, I'm equating substitution rate and mutation rate because the data says so."  Two independent machine transcriptions now agree on the sentence, so the merged article prints it, with this route recorded in `literature-review.md`;  no person has listened to it, and a human check would still be the stronger standard.  The row stays here as the record. |
| "Using our empirical rate to calibrate the mtDNA molecular clock" | Parsons et al. 1997, [Nature Genetics](https://www.nature.com/articles/ng0497-363), within the passage calculating about 6,500 years | The previous dossier compared agreeing transcriptions. The primary abstract confirms the experiment's count and rate. The full paper's exact printed locator for the quoted passage was not newly verified; the article paraphrases its implication and rejection with this limitation stated in the footnote. |
| "Thus, our observation of the substitution rate, 2.5/site/Myr, is roughly 20-fold higher than would be predicted from phylogenetic analyses.  Using our empirical rate to calibrate the mtDNA molecular clock would result in an age of the mtDNA MRCA of only ~6,500 y.a., clearly incompatible with the known age of modern humans."  Followed by:  "Even acknowledging that the MRCA of mtDNA may be younger than the MRCA of modern humans, it remains implausible to explain the known geographic distribution of mtDNA sequence variation by human migration that occurred only in the last ~6,500 years." | Parsons et al. 1997, *Nature Genetics* 15:363-368, body text (the pre-merge `mitochondrial-eve` article's pull quote and footnote `parsons-1997:a`, no page) | Merge of 2026-10-27:  the PubMed abstract (PMID 9090380, fetched as bytes) does not contain these sentences;  it verifies only the count (ten substitutions in 327 generational events), the 1/33-generation and 2.5/site/Myr rate, and "roughly twenty-fold higher than estimates derived from phylogenetic analyses."  Eric's notes (`/home/share/notes/eric/research/biology/mtEve.md` line 332) give a different wording, "would result in an average age of the mtDNA MRCA [most recent common ancestor] of only ~6,500 y.a.", with "average", and place a neighbouring sentence on p. 364.  nature.com served its paywall page and scholar.archive.org a session challenge.  The merged article prints the abstract sentences and paraphrases the 6,500-year calculation without quotation marks.  What would settle it:  a scan of p. 364 of the printed article. |
| "about 6500 years ago" | A sentence variously attributed to Gibbons and to Loewe and Scherer, 1997 | The source audit reports a wrong DOI and a different *Trends in Ecology & Evolution* item. The wording and attribution were not verified from that journal page. Retain the longer original passage in the archive; do not merge it with Gibbons' independently identified article. |

The seven short excerpts on the [quotation page](quotes.md) have separate source-byte and locator checks. A source being difficult to access does not show that its quotation is fabricated.