Rejecting a quotation from publication and erasing it from the record are two different decisions. This page is the record.
What this page is
This page carries what the article could not use. It is written for the next researcher, not for the article's reader: the wording as it circulates, the exact fetch that failed, and the specific document somebody would need to obtain to overturn the verdict.
Status words used below.
- UNVERIFIABLE — no route to the named source has been found yet. That is a statement about this project's reach, not about the claim. "I could not find it" is not "it does not exist."
- UNSOURCED — the claim is real and in circulation, and the source it is attributed to has not been shown to contain it.
- NOT FOUND — a search was run and returned nothing. Recorded as a search result, not as a fact about the world.
- MISUSED — the text is real and correctly attributed, and quoting it the way it is normally quoted would overstate or invert what its author meant.
- RELEASED — the entry was quarantined, then verified by a route that worked later. The record of the doubt stays here; the claim has moved into the article with its verification route named.
A standing rule applies to every entry below. Nothing here was established with Claude's WebFetch tool, which converts a page to markdown and answers through a small summarising model that can paraphrase without saying so. Every quotation considered for this article was read off downloaded bytes: curl for web pages and PDFs, bin/pmcget.py for PubMed Central author manuscripts, pdftotext -layout for two-column journal PDFs, bin/iapdsearch.py for printdisabled archive.org books, and the Europe PMC REST service read as raw JSON.
1. "SLC24A5 explains 25 to 38 percent of the European-African difference in skin melanin index"
Status: UNSOURCED, and it is not in the article.
Wording as it circulates. Some version of "a single gene, SLC24A5, accounts for 25 to 38 percent of the difference in skin tone between Europeans and Africans." It appears in popular science writing, in textbooks, and in creationist writing that wants a small number of large-effect genes.
Claimed source. Almost universally: Lamason, Rebecca L., et al., "SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans," Science 310(5755):1782–1786, 16 December 2005, doi:10.1126/science.1116238.
What was found. The full text could not be obtained by any of six routes. Europe PMC reports it is not in the open-access subset. The science.org PDF returns 403. Three university course-page mirrors return 404. ResearchGate returns 403. A Wayback id_ fetch of the legacy sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/310/5755/1782.pdf returns 404. The archive.org sim_science microfilm collection does not hold the December 2005 issues; an advanced search returns zero.
What was obtained is the verbatim abstract, from the Europe PMC REST API, which returns a stored machine-readable field rather than a summariser's output:
"Lighter variations of pigmentation in humans are associated with diminished number, size, and density of melanosomes, the pigmented organelles of melanocytes. Here we show that zebrafish golden mutants share these melanosomal changes and that golden encodes a putative cation exchanger slc24a5 (nckx5) that localizes to an intracellular membrane, likely the melanosome or its precursor. The human ortholog is highly similar in sequence and functional in zebrafish. The evolutionarily conserved ancestral allele of a human coding polymorphism predominates in African and East Asian populations. In contrast, the variant allele is nearly fixed in European populations, is associated with a substantial reduction in regional heterozygosity, and correlates with lighter skin pigmentation in admixed populations, suggesting a key role for the SLC24A5 gene in human pigmentation."
The 25 to 38 percent figure is not in that abstract. If it exists it is in the body, around p. 1785, which was not read. It is therefore not printed anywhere in the article on Lamason's authority, and no other source read for this article states it.
What the article uses instead. Two verified figures, both read off bytes on disk. Beleza 2013 p. 30 gives the effect measured in admixed populations as 7.6 to 11.4 average melanin units for SLC24A5, against 5 for SLC45A2 and 2.8 to 3.8 for KITLG, with the authors' own warning that "the size of the effect of the genes could be overestimated." Crawford 2017 gives SLC24A5 as 12.8% ± 3.5% of the pigmentation variance among 1,570 Africans, and a per-allele beta of 7.69 melanin-index units.
What would change the verdict. Any full text of Lamason 2005: a university proxy, an AAAS institutional session, an interlibrary scan, or the print Science volume. A registered AAAS reader account does not open it; this is a paywalled 2005 research article, not an item flagged free with registration.
2. Any Jeanson or Answers Research Journal treatment of pigmentation
Status: NOT FOUND. This is a search result, not a fact.
Why it matters. Nathaniel Jeanson is the most quantitative writer on the young-earth genetics side, and Answers Research Journal is the movement's technical outlet. If the article says that the creationist technical literature is silent on pigmentation architecture, that claim rests entirely on a negative search and must be stated as one.
What was searched. answersingenesis.org and the Answers Research Journal index were searched for a paper treating pigmentation genetics as its own subject. Nothing was found. Separately, archive.org advanced search on title:traced AND creator:Jeanson returned 0 results, so Traced: Human DNA's Big Surprise (Master Books, 2022) is not in the Internet Archive at all, and bin/iapdsearch.py has nothing to search there. A Google Books API query for intitle:Traced inauthor:Jeanson returned no volume.
The route not tried, and it is the one that should be tried next. bin/iapdsearch.py against the archive.org items for Replacing Darwin (2017) and Traced (2022), querying "skin colour", "skin color" and "pigmentation". The 2026-08-24 finding in this project's memory is that printdisabled archive.org items are readable in whole paragraphs through the search-inside endpoint even when they cannot be borrowed, and that believing otherwise has already cost this project weeks. Traced did not appear under the one title search run above, but Replacing Darwin was not searched at all, and a second search by identifier rather than by title may find either.
Alternative routes. A hoopla or Libby borrow through Scott County Public Library; Master Books titles are often on hoopla, and this is worth one of the ten monthly borrows only if a future revision leans on Jeanson.
Until then, the article says exactly this: no Jeanson or Answers Research Journal treatment of pigmentation was found, by the searches listed above, and that is a statement about what was searched. It does not claim that none exists.
3. Lalueza-Fox 2007 on Neanderthal MC1R
Status: PARTLY RELEASED 2026-09-06. Publisher abstract obtained and quoted; full text still not obtained.
Why it matters. The Creation Answers Book chapter 18, p. 233, footnote 12, cites Lalueza-Fox et al., "A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals," Science 318:1453–1455, 2007, and reads it as showing Neanderthals could have had the range of colouration seen in Europeans today. That citation sits on the same page as the chapter's claim that natural selection "does not produce skin colours." Whether the paper supports or embarrasses the chapter turns on what it actually reports.
What was tried and failed. OpenAlex reports oa_status: closed and any_repository_has_fulltext: false. There is no PMC record. The DOI resolves to a Science paywall. A reconstruction from OpenAlex's abstract_inverted_index was made and rejected, because an inverted index reassembles into a plausible word order rather than a verified one.
What was obtained. The publisher-supplied abstract, as raw JSON from the Europe PMC REST service for PMID 17962522. That is the publisher's own text delivered whole, not a reconstruction, and it is quotable. It reads in part: "Both specimens have a mutation that was not found in approximately 3700 modern humans analyzed" and "Our data suggest that inactive MC1R variants evolved independently in both modern humans and Neanderthals." Crossref independently confirms Science 318(5855):1453–1455, 30 November 2007, and the seventeen-author list.
What is still quarantined. Everything inside the paper. No page, figure, sample count or method from the body is cited anywhere in the article, and the footnote says on its face that it is abstract-only.
What would change the verdict. A Science subscription, or an author copy in a Spanish institutional repository such as CSIC, which was not tried.
4. Robins 1991, "not a scintilla"
Status: RELEASED 2026-09-06. Verified in the source itself and now cited directly.
Wording. Jablonski & Chaplin 2000, p. 73, quote Robins as concluding that "there is not a scintilla of paleontological or experimental evidence that rickets (or osteomalacia) ever did or would have manifested, regardless of skin colour," cited as Robins, 1991:208.
Why it was here. A hostile critic quoted by the person criticising him is exactly the situation where a check is owed, and the book had not been opened.
How it was resolved. The archive.org item isbn_9780521365147 is mediatype: texts in the printdisabled collection, so it cannot be borrowed. bin/iapdsearch.py isbn_9780521365147 '"not a scintilla"' returned the whole paragraph at leaf 226. BookReaderJSIA.php maps leaf 226 to printed page 208, with leaves 224, 225, 227 and 228 mapping to 206, 207, 209 and 210, which independently confirms Jablonski's "1991:208".
What the check found. Robins wrote "palaeontological"; Jablonski silently Americanises it, and her "[sic]" is on his "colour", not on anything substantive. The sense is accurate and the context does not soften it: the sentence closes his section "Skin depigmentation: the vitamin D hypothesis", whose surrounding pages argue from skeletal surveys that show no rickets. The article now quotes Robins directly, with his own spelling, and reports two of his reasons rather than only his verdict. Jablonski's rendering is kept as a separate footnote because the article also reports how she answers him.
5. Carter's two second-hand geneticist quotations
Status: UNVERIFIABLE at source, not used.
Wording. Carter's 2017 CMI article quotes Lluis Quintana-Murci: "But the genes that explain the phenotypic differences between populations only represent a tiny part of our genome, confirming once again that the concept of 'race' from a genetic standpoint has been abolished." And Sarah Tishkoff: "There is so much diversity in Africans that there is no such thing as an African race."
Why they are here. Neither is given a full citation in Carter's body text. The Tishkoff line is flagged in Carter's own note as "Quoted in Gibbons, 2017, ref 3," which is Ann Gibbons's Science news write-up, not a paper. That news item is paywalled and was not fetched. Tishkoff is the senior author of the very paper Carter is responding to, so the quotation matters, and quoting a scientist through a news summary of a paper the writer never opened is the exact failure mode this project's own rules exist to prevent.
How the article handles it. Neither quotation appears. The point they would have supported, that pigmentation is a poor population marker, is carried instead by Martin 2017's measured Irish-versus-Ghanaian variance ratio.
What would change the verdict. The Science news item, or the primary interviews behind it.
6. "The first people were exterminated"
Status: MISUSED risk, reported but not endorsed.
Wording. Carter 2017: "There are vast swaths of territory with no evidence that the original people mixed with the Bantu conquerors. In other words, the first people were exterminated."
What was found. His reference 7 is Skoglund et al. 2017, Cell 171:59–71, which reports differential admixture and ancestry replacement. "Ancestry replacement" and "extermination without mixing" are not the same claim, and Skoglund was not obtained and read in this pass.
How the article handles it. The Bantu-expansion mechanism is real, well documented, and worth taking seriously, and the article says so in general terms without repeating the extermination sentence or citing Skoglund for it. Repeating a claim stronger than its cited source is the first thing a hostile reader finds.
What would change the verdict. Reading Skoglund et al. 2017 directly and checking whether it supports population replacement without admixture in the specific regions Carter has in mind.
7. The Ginger 2008 SLC24A5 knockdown block quotation
Status: UNVERIFIABLE in this pass, not used.
Wording. A block quotation carried in this project's own long-standing notes at /home/share/notes/eric/research/biology/speciation.md, attributed to Ginger, R. S., et al., "SLC24A5 encodes a trans-Golgi network protein with potassium-dependent sodium-calcium exchange activity that regulates human epidermal melanogenesis," J. Biol. Chem. 283(9):5486–5495, 2008, and beginning "A non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphism in the human SLC24A5 gene is associated with natural human skin color variation…".
Why it is here. The quotation was taken from the article's open HTML in an earlier year and was not re-fetched from the JBC bytes in the research pass for this article. A quotation whose last verified fetch nobody can name is not verified.
How the article handles it. It is not quoted. The functional point it carries, that the SLC24A5 light allele changes exchanger activity and reduces melanin, is made instead from Sturm & Duffy 2012, which is CC-BY and was read directly.
What would change the verdict. A fresh curl of the JBC article or its PMC record, read locally.