Still putative.
I've been saying for a while that talking to the Anna Anderson apologists is like dealing with creationists, and I see that quote-mining is another similarity.
I didn't say "BTW, that would be samples. Plural." I said "BTW, that would be samples. Plural. Samples from different sources. Samples with the same DNA pattern." As Dr Gill himself said, the fact that samples from different sources gave the same DNA pattern is a very strong indication that the samples were from the same person. So to dismiss them as still being as unconvincing as they were before the analysis is to either misunderstand the significance of the result or to deliberately reject it despite its strength.
My question to you is: Why do you want me to believe something that a court of law would not accept as evidence?
You know, throughout this discussion, you've been awfully fond of stating things as hard fact that aren't. They both had congenital hallux valgus, except that there's no actual data about angles to show that they had the same extent of hallux valgus and the only basis for Anna Anderson's condition being called congenital is apparently some comment by a doctor treating her for TB. They both had the same identical hair colour except that well maybe one was a bit lighter than the other but then hair does change colour with age. They both had the same eye colour except that the description is both subjective and vague. They were the same height except that some people say they weren't. The DNA results won't stand up in court, except that there hasn't been a trial since 1994 so we don't know that. These are assertions, not statements of fact.
And as far as court cases are concerned, there was a court case a few decades ago which found against Anna Anderson, and that apparently hasn't made any difference to you. So I don't see why legal standards are so much more important to you than scientific standards in a scientific matter.
To answer your question about why I want you to believe something: I don't care what you believe, I just don't like the way the Anna Anderson apologists are engaged in trashing very impressive scientific results and casting aspersions on the integrity and competence of the scientists. The Ginther study was pointed out as one where the chains of custody were secure; those chains of custody included the one involving the sample from Sofia of Hanover. Her DNA matched that of Prince Philip. That, by itself, confirms that the sample from Prince Philip actually was from him (or at least from a female-line relative of Sofia and hence of Tsarina Alexandra). The chain of custody of the Prince Philip sample thus becomes irrelevant. The identity has been confirmed by the match with another sample, for which the chain of custody is as certain as you can get, so we're told. Yet you and especially Peter Kurth are still banging on about the chain of custody of the Prince Philip sample - and in his case resorting to a flat-out falsehood in the process with that comment about plucking hairs - as though it somehow invalidated the results. The results for the Prince Philip sample have been confirmed by the match with the Princess Sofia sample. End of.
Equally, with the two samples from Anna Anderson, which Drs Gill and Stoneking correctly refer to as "said to have come from" since they received them indirectly, the fact that specimens of one sample were tested in two labs and the second sample was tested in a third lab and they all had the same sequence is scientifically a very, very strong result. Even more so since Dr Ginther said just three years ago that although the techniques were very new, the results of Drs Gill and Stoneking were believable. From the knowlege base about mtDNA testing in 2005 he still thinks those results are scientifically sound.
From Dr Ginther's letter, the Maucher samples were only tested in one of the labs, not all three, so contamination of the Anderson samples with DNA from Karl Maucher would have shown up immediately because the three Anderson samples wouldn't have matched (assuming the genuine Anna Anderson samples had been different from the Karl Maucher sample). That's even assuming the Maucher sample was in the lab at the time the Anderson samples were being tested, and I believe it was stated by one of the scientists that they weren't.
Since the three samples gave the same results, they weren't dealing with the contamination problem that Dr Ginther faced with his sample, where different results were obtained in just about every attempt at sequencing, so again this shows that the DNA in the samples was from just one person. Dr Ginther obtained results from his sample that were not scientifically meaningful, as he said himself. He knows the difference between believable results and nonbelievable ones; he was honest and didn't try and pass his results off as being what they weren't, and he's the person who said that the work of Gill, Stoneking, Sullivan, et al was believable. I'm having a hard time understanding why the Anna-was-Anastasia people think Dr Ginther was on their side - in fact his letter was a nail in the coffin of the notion that the Gill-Stoneking results weren't significant.
The only way these results could be explained, apart from that the two samples were from the same person (and the notion that they were from the same person who wasn't Anna Anderson is exceedingly unlikely), is massive and deliberate fraud on the part of all the scientists involved. Career-ending fraud if it ever got out. Fraud for which the benefits, whatever they were, don't seem to outweigh the risks. And yet the objections to the results, with this chain-of-custody business and with the "scientists are no more ethical than the rest of us, I mean look at Hwang Woo-Suk and Jan-Hendrik Schon and don't get me started about Ernst Haeckel and Piltdown Man," are basically just a suggestion that there might have been some underhanded monkey business going on.
And that's what I'm objecting to. These results are scientifically sound. Even if they wouldn't hold up in a court of law - and we don't actually know that, it's just another assertion of yours that they wouldn't - they're very strong scientifically. And since they were, when all is said and done, scientific tests, they deserve to be judged by their own standards. A clever lawyer can plant seeds of doubt about anything, especially in the current climate where the American public has been fed a steady diet of anti-science propaganda from the religious and political right for the last 20 or 30 years. So for me, that's a lot less relevant than the scientific worth of the scientific results. As I said before, I don't especially care if the legal standards mean more to you than the scientific ones. I just don't like the implication of incompetence, dishonesty, or both on the part of the scientists, especially since there's no evidence for it.
Since you asked.
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