Island-Hopping to Iran

Larry Johnson believes he knows what the “Trump” administration’s “insane plan” is. And if he’s right, it’s not a good one:

Here is how I understand it came together. The week of October 19, Trump was presented with a menu of options for a renewed war on Iran. The plans were not drawn up by the Joint Staff’s J5, the Pentagon’s chief planning directorate, but by the J5 at Central Command, the headquarters that will actually fight the war. Trump, my source says, chose the option of seizing one or more islands. Murphy’s “insane” comment, after his briefing, fits that choice. Murphy has not publicly named the targets. Analysts discussing his briefing have mentioned Kharg, Iran’s main oil export terminal, and Qeshm, the large island that sits across the Strait of Hormuz.

And then, on October 29, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the Joint Staff’s J5. The Pentagon says he was removed for leaking classified information and failing polygraph tests. Two other Pentagon sources told CBS those accusations are false. What I am told, and what other analysts have heard from their own sources, is that Sylvia opposed the island plan…

The traditional way to take an island is an amphibious landing: ships, landing craft, Marines wading ashore. That is almost certainly off the table. Any American amphibious ship that sails into the Persian Gulf puts itself inside range of Iranian anti-ship missiles, drones, mines and fast attack boats. Kharg sits about 16 miles off Iran’s coast. Larak, near Qeshm, sits just a few miles off it. Sending a big-deck amphibious ship into that space is an invitation for the first American capital ship to be lost to enemy fire since the Second World War. Even Proceedings, the Naval Institute’s own journal, ran an analysis in April warning that the Navy might not be able to get close enough to launch amphibious vehicles at all.

That leaves the air. Either you drop paratroopers or you land C-130 transports on the island and offload troops. Here is the arithmetic problem. A C-130 carries fewer than 100 combat-loaded troops, and typically somewhere between 64 and 92 paratroopers, depending on the model. To put 1,000 soldiers or Marines on the ground, you need at least a dozen sorties, and far more once you add vehicles, ammunition, water, medical teams and air defense. Every one of those aircraft is a large, slow, unarmored target flying into airspace where Iran has had years to position short-range air defenses and shoulder-fired missiles. One aircraft shot down on approach and you have lost a company.

The first wave also has to secure the runway before anyone else can land, and we know who gets that job. Airfield seizure is the signature mission of the 75th Ranger Regiment. It is what the Rangers did at Point Salines in Grenada in 1983, at Rio Hato in Panama in 1989 and at Objective Rhino in Afghanistan in 2001. Ranger battalions are reportedly already in the theater, and they would almost certainly be handed the mission of jumping in and seizing the strip so the C-130s can follow. These are the finest light infantry in the world. They are also light infantry: lightly armed, carrying what they can jump with, and dependent on everything that comes in behind them. In Grenada and Panama, the defenders could not shell the airfield from the mainland a few miles away. Here, Iran can. Iran also knows the Rangers’ playbook as well as anyone who has read the history, which means it knows exactly which runway to watch. Sending the Rangers to seize an airfield within sight of the Iranian coast is asking America’s best to hold the door open in a room that is already on fire.

The landing is not even the hard part. The hard part is the day after. Once American troops are on the island, they are sitting a few miles from the Iranian coast with no hardened fortifications, inside range of Iranian artillery, rockets, ballistic missiles and swarms of drones. Iran will not need to retake the island. It will simply shell it, around the clock, for as long as the Americans choose to stay. And the Americans will be defending themselves with the same depleted interceptor stocks Miller describes, against targets that are cheap for Iran to build and expensive for us to stop.

Then there is resupply. A Marine Expeditionary Unit carries enough to sustain itself for roughly 15 days. After that, every bullet, every gallon of fuel, every bottle of water and every replacement part has to arrive by air or by sea, through the same gauntlet that made the landing so dangerous. Casualties have to go out the same way. That means an endless air bridge of vulnerable transports, or ships parked inside the Gulf, or both. The island becomes a hostage, and the American public watches the casualty count rise every evening on the news.

And what would it achieve? Seizing a couple of small islands near the Strait does not neutralize Iran’s long southern coastline, which is where the missiles and drones that threaten shipping are actually launched. Taking Kharg would cut into Iran’s oil exports, but Iran has other terminals, and the most likely response would be more strikes on the Gulf states’ oil and water infrastructure, the infrastructure that is already being held together with tape. We would be trading a symbolic flag-raising for a permanent target.

If this is the plan – and it might only be a smoke screen – it’s right up there with The Bay of Pigs. It wouldn’t be even remotely surprising if the US military refused its orders from a fake Commander in Chief.

Because whatever that is pretending to be the President of the United States, it’s not Donald Trump.

DISCUSS ON SG

STAR WARS and the Boomer History

This is an intriguing essay on the way in which the dreadful way Star Wars turned out was due to it being, in essence, an artistic expression of the Boomer view of history:

Every generation has a founding myth. The boomers did not earn theirs. It was handed to them, and they spent it like an inheritance, down to the last penny, on themselves.

The fathers paid for that story in blood. They came home and said very little about it. What the sons did with it is the charge. They took one war and made it the only war. They took one enemy and made him the template for every enemy. They took a vast, tragic, morally tangled contest between great powers and flattened it into a passion play with two parts available for casting: the liberator and the monster. Then they cast themselves.

That is the boomer view of history. Everything before 1945 is prologue. Everything after is a rerun. Every opponent is Hitler. Every inherited custom is a milepost on the road to the camps. Every institution older than they are is suspect, and demolishing it counts automatically as liberation. History stops being a contest of houses, orders, interests and loyalties, each with a real claim, and becomes a Sunday school pageant where virtue belongs to whoever is holding the hammer.

Notice how little thinking this permits. An aristocratic education reads history as tragedy: competing goods, statesmen choosing between evils, orders that rise and rot by their own internal logic. Thucydides. Clarendon. Burke. The boomer education forbids all of it. No tragedy, only villainy. No competing goods, only the righteous and the damned. Ask an honest question about the founding myth and you have confessed to being the monster. The range of permitted debate is narrow by design, and it is policed by people who could not survive a wider one.

The result is sterility. A civilization that can tell only one story cannot understand itself, cannot understand its rivals, and cannot explain why orders endure or collapse. It cannot discuss power at all except as evil, which is extremely convenient, because it means never having to account for its own. And while refusing to discuss power, it built an order of its own: moralizing, incurious, and sealed against challenge, because every challenger had already been assigned the villain’s costume before he opened his mouth.

If you wanted that worldview on film, you would build a galaxy of liberators and monsters with nothing permitted in between. Lucas built exactly that. Star Wars is the boomer view of history in its purest available form, which is why it is the best evidence we have against them.

It is really remarkable what a hold Star Wars had on the culture, considering that it was actually about one and one-third good movies. Even though I absolutely loved the first movie, I realized about the time they reached the Ewok planet during Jedi that I’d fundamentally lost interest in the story after the evacuation of Hoth.

I was lured in by the long-awaited making of the first prequel movie, and attended it with my best friend with whom I’d seen Star Wars at the age of seven, and our wives. I walked out of The Phantom Menace shaking my head, and haven’t seen a single Star Wars movie or television show since.

DISCUSS ON SG

EU-Backed Coup in Poland

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has attempted an Orange Revolution-style coup in Poland, backed by the European Union:

On the night of this Friday, strong units of the Polish Police have cordoned off the headquarters of the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw, in the open outbreak of a prolonged crisis over the composition of the body’s leadership, which has for months pitted Prime Minister Donald Tusk against his two main political adversaries: the leader of Law and Justice and former head of Government, Jaroslaw Kaczinski, and the current president of the country, Karel Nawrocki.

The institutional clash dates back to the beginning of this year, when Nawrocki, an ally of Kaczinski, refused to swear in three of the six magistrates appointed by Parliament. To this blockade was added the president of the Constitutional Court, Bogdan Swieczkowski, who refused to allow the judges elected by the current parliamentary majority to take office.

Hours before the Police were deployed, the Polish official agency PAP reported that Swieczkowski and his number two, Bartlomiej Sochanski, had been suspended for a month and that their profiles had disappeared from the court’s website by order of Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska.

Given the seriousness of the situation, Nawrocki has canceled his official trip to Senegal and has announced that he is returning to the country. “At a time like this, the president must be in Poland,” he declared, while Kaczinski, also through social networks, denounced that the court is suffering an “attack” by the “services of Tusk” in an unprecedented episode on a “global scale”.

According to the leader of Law and Justice, “From today, Poland becomes a police state, and from there there is already a direct path to authoritarianism, and then to totalitarianism. The Tribunal is the guarantee of our freedom and sovereignty. Tusk’s trampling of the law knows no limits”.

Considering what has happened to the people of Ukraine since the Kiev regime took control, they would do well to make sure that the Eurofascists are not successful with a second “coup for democracy”.

Clown World is getting desperate. I expect this means that there will be escalation in the Middle East soon. Stay frosty and well-stocked.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika and the Evo-Avengers 009

Dr. Zach Hancock, a population geneticist who allegedly teaches the subject as an Assistant Professor at Augusta University, left a comment defending himself after Will Duffy repeatedly called him out for his lackluster and uninformed response to Probability Zero in Will’s recent appearance on the Gutsick Gibbon channel. At least, I think that was supposed to be the purpose, although it appears to be more of a public exhibition of self-destruction than self-defense.

My thoughts: 1. At 33:42, Will quotes Vox Day being upset no one wants to read his book. It’s simple. If we (scientists) stopped to read every crackpot book that claims to overturn our field, we’d never get any science done. There are real scientists writing groundbreaking work that I sadly haven’t gotten around to reading yet. The reason we don’t want to read his book is because he’s irrelevant. Furthermore, Will claims to present Vox’s argument. Thus, any misunderstanding on mine or Erika’s part is a fault on Will, not our willingness to read the book. If a student of mine doesn’t understand natural selection after I present a lecture on it, I don’t say, “Well, it’s because you didn’t read Darwin’s Origin!” I own that I did a bad job teaching the argument.

That is a blatant lie. Will did not quote me about being upset. He did not quote me as being upset because I never said that I was. I am not even remotely upset that my credentialed critics haven’t read Population Zero. To the contrary, as Will literally quoted me, I predicted on September 23, 2026 that they would not read the book.

“I do not expect anyone to actually (a) talk to me or (b) read the book. I don’t know what it is about biologists, population geneticists, and other science enthusiasts, but they always seem to imagine they can effectively critique anything without bothering to actually learn anything about it.”

This does not upset me. To the contrary, it leads me to believe they are tremendously stupid for saying one single word about a book they haven’t read.

Back in the day, I was a game reviewer nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and I also reviewed games for Computer Gaming World. I would occasionally go without food or sleep in order to play through an entire game in order to meet a CGW deadline, because neither Johnny Wilson nor Chris Lombardi permitted a reviewer to write a review for a game without completing it first. The real challenge was to do so without using the provided cheat codes. I wrote the cover review for id Software’s Heretic after playing it through in 18 hours straight and it took a week before I could close my eyes without strafing. So I have nothing but deep contempt for these fake reviewers who observably and self-admittedly have no idea what they’re talking about.

There is nothing wrong with being too busy to engage with new ideas. The problem is that Hancock is trying to simultaneously engage and not-engage with these new ideas, which is both nonsensical and pointless. And if he’s so busy, then why is he wasting all these hours on what amounts to nothing more than a pseudo-scientific Maoist struggle session? I suspect the actual reason is that he suspects the mathematical structures of his field are shaky and he’s afraid to look too closely at precisely how precarious its foundations are.

Will is not responsible for teaching anyone anything. Dr. Zachary Hancock, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Augusta University, is not his student. If Dr. Hancock isn’t going to read the book, that’s absolutely fine, but then he should sit down and shut the fuck up because all he’s going to accomplish is to demonstrate that he’s not only ignorant, but stupid and unprofessional as well.

At 34:38, Will states that Day’s d is “still necessary.” If true, then he shouldn’t have set it equal to 1 when he presented it. Furthermore, the reason that “d” is not a variable in population genetics is because it’s nonsensical. How fast the entire gene pool turns over is not meaningful, because alleles are not turning over and appearing all at once, but are staggered through time. Will flashes the “d formula” on the screen, claims there are variables not accounted for, but doesn’t define any of the variables in the equation to support this claim. Yet again, this is a “read Vox’s book” moment. No. You are making the argument. Explain it. If you can’t, don’t make it.

The necessity of a variable is not determined by what it happens to be set at when it is presented. Hancock also dismisses the selective turnover coefficient by asserting that “how fast the entire gene pool turns over is not meaningful, because alleles are not turning over and appearing all at once, but are staggered through time.” This is a non sequitur. Rates are by definition averages of staggered events. The SNP mutation rate is an average of mutations that don’t all happen at once. The fixation rate is an average of fixations that don’t all happen at once. Dismissing a rate because the underlying events are staggered would invalidate every single rate in population genetics. Hancock either needs to show that d is internally incoherent or that the generational overlap it measures is adequately captured by existing parameters. He does neither.

His complaint about Will not defining d for him is ludicrous because there is both an entire chapter and an appendix that not only defines the selective turnover coefficient, but shows its derivation, provides the empirical evidence for it, as well as explains why it is necessary and how it is different from the various things that Hancock incorrectly believed do the same thing.

Ironically, Hancock himself illustrates the need for d later in his comments. This simply underlines how stupid he is for attempting to criticize a book that he hasn’t read. Sit down and shut the fuck up, Zachary. You are clearly and observably too short for this ride.

At 37:00, Will makes the claim, apparently first pointed out by his popgen teacher, Griffiths, that the fixation equation I showed is derived explicitly for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), not structural variation. I have no idea where either of them came up with that. At no point does the fixation equations I presented distinguish between mutational types, whether explicitly or implicitly. The mutation rate I initially use is for SNPs, but the adjustment to 76.8 for a haploid genome, following the correction, modifies that rate to include structural variants as well. That is, u = (3e9)*(76.8) = 2.56e-8, not the 1.2e-8 I used for the SNP calculation.

Amusingly, Hancock makes a major error in the process of claiming his critics don’t understand the math. He writes: “The mutation rate I initially use is for SNPs, but the adjustment to 76.8 for a haploid genome, following the correction, modifies that rate to include structural variants as well.”

He’s saying he swapped mutation rates mid-calculation. He started with the SNP rate (~1.2×10⁻⁸ per site per generation), then switched to 76.8 mutations per haploid genome per generation (from Perubski et al.), which includes structural variants. He claims the fixation equation is indifferent to mutation type in an attempt to justify his switch as being valid.

But it’s not. The ~35 million divergent sites between humans and chimps that are the 1.09% divergence figure are measured in single nucleotide differences. If you inflate your mutation rate to include structural variants, then you need to compare your predicted fixation count against the total divergence, not against the SNP-only divergence. You cannot use a total mutation rate as the input and then validate the output against a fraction of the genome that omits 98.91 percent of the total. And being a mathematician, Griffiths was absolutely correct to flag it, as I previously did as well. Zach’s claim that “at no point does the fixation equation distinguish between mutational types” is totally irrelevant with regards to the empirical application of where all those expected neutral mutations happened to fix.

Again, Zachary really needs to sit down and shut the fuck up. Both a game designer and a billiards player clearly and observably understand his job better than he does.

4. At 38:04, Will states I use the wrong generation number (252,000 instead of 201,600). Again, I used the number that Will presented. What Will should be doing here is saying, “I was wrong, I presented the wrong number.” Again, this would be as if I taught a concept incorrectly and then blamed my students for not reading the textbook and catching my mistake. You are the one making the argument, Will. Own it and get it right.

That’s exactly what d does, you absolute fucking moron. When d=1, as in the Wright-Fisher model, there are 252,000 generations separating the CHLCA from modern humanity. When d=0.80, as the weighted time-average that corrects for overlapping human generations over that period works out to be, that leaves 201,600 effective generations available. This is one of the many reasons why Hancock should have read the book before ever opening his mouth in the first place. Notice that contrary to what Hancock previously said, neither Wright-Fisher nor Moran accounts for this correction, which is precisely why the selective turnover coefficient was developed in the first place.

5. Lastly, at 38:11, we get the most bizarre claim yet. He seems to believe that the 1.09% of divergent sites are the *only ones that could have diverged neutrally*. About 90% of the human genome lacks signs of selective constraint. This means that since we diverged from chimps, any of those sites could have been the ones that alternatively fixed between us. But which ones actually fix is entirely random. Rerun the clock, and a different 1.09% would fix. The fact that only 1.09% have fixed is a testament of the recency of our divergence, not that those were the only one’s that could fix. There’s nothing special about those sites. This is like being shocked when a random number generator spits out a specific number. For me, the most frustrating thing here is that no one has yet addressed why the classical population genetic fixation formulas are incorrect. There have been quibbles about mutation rates, whether or not we read Vox’s book, and what his coefficients mean. But the fact is that Vox’s model is refuted by basic population genetics from the 1930s that I derived already. And we have seen clearly that both Will and Griffiths don’t understand them, or they wouldn’t make the “explicitly relies on SNP” argument. Will seems to suggest that Griffiths, Day, and myself are going to have some meeting of the minds to work this all out and get to the bottom of it. This is frankly insulting. It’s like telling a surgeon that your accountant buddy is going to join at the operating table to help figure out the surgery.

At this point, we have no choice but to conclude that Dr. Zach Hancock is quite literally retarded. Was he some sort of diversity hire or something? First, WE are the ones who pointed out that the neutral mutations have to apply to the entire genome. HE is the one who tried to apply all of them to the 1.09 percent SNP divergence. Second, he’s flat-out lying again because I have specifically addressed why the classical population genetic fixation formulas are incorrect. You can read the papers for yourself; and don’t let the titles mislead you, as each one directly addresses a specific population genetic formula, from Wright-Fisher and Haldane to Kimura and Ohta.

k ≠ μ: The Finite-Time Collapse of Neutral Substitution Theory

The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift

Relictation: A Third Evolutionary Mechanism

The Selective Turnover Coefficient: Distinguishing Selection from Drift in Age-Structured Populations

Independent Confirmation of Haldane’s Limit: Empirical Validation Through Observed Fixation Rates

The Bernoulli Barrier: How Parallel Fixation Violates the Law of Large Numbers

While I am perfectly willing to engage in a public discussion of the issues raised by Population Zero, I very much doubt there is any purpose in including Dr. Zach Hancock in any discussion of evolution that involves mathematics. He is neither intelligent enough nor well-read enough to meaningfully participate in one.

And Dr. Zachary B. Hancock’s PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Texas A&M clearly isn’t worthy of serving as toilet paper in a roadside Taco Bell.

DISCUSS ON SG

Fourth Time’s the Charm

A U.S. Senator from Connecticut says that “Trump” is going to restart the Iran war after the mid-terms:

Trump is reportedly planning to restart war with Iran after the election. Some of us have been briefed on the war plan. And while I cannot disclose any details, I can say this: the plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives and will set off a new cycle of escalation.

Well, this may explain why so many governments around the world have been warning their citizens to stock up on supplies. If you don’t already, I’d be sure to have two week’s worth of water and food on hand.

The one thing about insanity is that you can’t ever reasonably anticipate its limits. But if whatever lunacy they try is going to effect the supply chain, then it’s going to effect most of us. And based on the first three attempts and the recent firing of the top US military strategist, I have no problem believing that the plan will not achieve its objectives.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika and the Evo-Avengers 008

VD: This is not my response to the two Eco-Avenger videos, this is the portion of the transcript of Will Duffy’s appearance last night on Ms Matthew’s channel when they discussed Probability Zero.

On Reading the Book and Watching the Response

Will: Here are my receipts. I purchased Probability Zero on July 26th and I didn’t read it right away. Then I purchased Hardcoded on August 9th. Then I purchased The Frozen Gene on August 10th. And then I emailed Vox for the first time on August 22nd. So these are the receipts. This is the exact timeline. This was nothing I had in my back pocket. This wasn’t the long game.

As to how I knew so many details about Vox Day, including details about his son—it’s quite simple. I read his books. Everything in my presentation was from his books. Everything.

It will come as a shock to most of you that Erica, Dr. Zack Hancock, Dr. Dan, Dr. Maddie Frank, and Grayson Hawk did not read the Probability Zero book that my presentation was based on. Details forthcoming. I had a lot of homework this go-round. I had to rewatch the last presentation, watch Erica’s rebuttal video to Vox Day, and then watch “Six Scientists Roast Vox Day” for over four hours. These videos were 12 hours, 42 minutes, and 25 seconds long total. My game plan: Step one, rewatch Human Evolution 2 live stream. Step two, meet with Mike Griffiths. Step three, watch Erica’s response video to Vox Day. Step four, meet with Mike Griffiths. Step five, watch “Six Scientists Roast Vox Day.”

For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Mike Griffiths is a mathematician—he’s the head of maths at a private institution in England. He’s a huge fan of Erica, and he’s an atheist.

I want to highlight one comment from Dr. Dan over at Creation Myths: “Can we also just marvel at the fact that Will went to a GD billiards player to learn popgen instead of, I don’t know, a population geneticist?” I’ll let the comment speak for itself.

On the Fossil Record

Will: Erica covered a lot in the last session. She covered fossils, more fossils, and finally more fossils. The more Erica teaches me about the fossil record and the more I learn about it, the more I struggle to make sense of young earth creationism.

I’m not going to elaborate on this now, but I will in January during our final discussion.

Predictions and Tiktaalik

Will: Erica, you said predictions are the gold standard of science. I’ve been thinking about that. Since our series started, I’ve tried to watch every evolution debate on the Modern Day Debate YouTube channel, and the number one evolution prediction that comes up almost every time is Tiktaalik. I’ve heard it so much that I never actually looked into the prediction and just accepted the claim that it was predicted. In the past couple weeks, I decided to look into it and I can’t find any evidence that it was predicted. I’m not making a positive claim that it wasn’t predicted—I’m just saying I can’t find any evidence that it was. So I want to know: in what way was Tiktaalik predicted?

Molecular Clock Discrepancies

Will: Erica, you said that the molecular clock matches with the fossil emergence time. Unfortunately, I have not had time to look into this, but I have been contacted by multiple people who said there are significant discrepancies with reconciling the fossil record with the molecular clock.

I have been sent multiple scientific papers that I haven’t read, and I’ll show them:

  • “The Origin of Animals: Can Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record Be Reconciled?”
  • “Uncertainty in the Timing of Origin of Animals and the Limits of Precision in Molecular Timescales”
  • “Survival and Selection Biases in Early Animal Evolution and a Source of Systematic Overestimation in Molecular Clocks”
  • “Re-evaluating Molecular Clock Maximum Age Calibrations Revives Pre-Ediacaran Divergence Estimates for Animals”

Teleology

Will: When this part of the presentation came up, I mentioned to Erica that I thought what she was saying went against what she said about teleology originally—that we can’t tell if something’s designed.

Here’s what was said in the last presentation: “There is actually a way to use fracture patterns to tell whether or not a tool was made by a hominin or not. You can actually roll a bunch of rocks down a hill and see how they break. So there’s a way to differentiate between something that was designed by hands and something that nature did in the case of stone tools.”

But in our first session, she said: “The problem with teleology is exactly what you see on the screen. We can’t differentiate between the designed and the natural.” And a couple minutes later: “It’s not that teleology is impossible. It’s that teleology is non-scientific because it can’t actually be tested.”

I do struggle to understand that when combined with saying there is a test we can do. I think it’s possible teleology is kind of sneaking back in the door here.

The Selection Coefficient / Selective Turnover Coefficient Error

Will: When Erica and Zach were going over my slide, Erica said that “d” in the formula is “Day’s selection coefficient.” And then she said, “What’s crazy is that Day’s selection coefficient isn’t actually a selection coefficient.”

This is unfortunate. If you go back and look at my slide, it’s a selective turnover coefficient. It is not a selection coefficient. So when you said Day’s selective turnover coefficient cannot do what a selection coefficient does, that was not valid because it’s not a selection coefficient.

Zach was presenting and said, “So Vox has this other term d, but we don’t know what it means.” He admitted that he doesn’t know what it means, which makes sense. Unfortunately, that entire section of the video was a category error, and I didn’t find one person in the thousands of comments who caught this—I could be wrong, but I think it’s because people did not read Probability Zero.

After reading the book, you walk away with a really good understanding of what a selection coefficient is in population genetics, and you would never confuse it with Day’s selective turnover coefficient d. In population genetics, a selection coefficient uses the symbol S, which I actually used in the formula. Selection coefficients are S. The selective turnover coefficient is d.

Who Actually Read the Book

Will: People ask, “How do you know so much about Vox?” I read his books. In the beginning of the second video, Erica said, “So we read his book. Now when I say ‘we,’ I mean me, Zach, and four of our other credentialed friends.” That was a collective “we,” and I think people might have missed what it actually meant. It didn’t mean all of them read the book.

  • Zach said: “It’s like trying to explain to a 5-year-old why the sky is blue. It’s just a waste of time and I’m not going to read your book. I’m not going to waste my time with it. I got science to do.” So Zach didn’t read the book.
  • Maddie said: “I read 40% of a book about this.” So she read less than half.
  • Erica said: “I read about 60 to 70% of the book in its entirety, whereas I skimmed the rest.”

Then something else happened. When Erica’s first video rebuttal to Vox Day came out, the numbers were not the same numbers that I originally presented. They were way off. The quotes and page numbers she was giving were not correct in my book. Come to find out, none of them purchased Probability Zero. They obtained an EPUB version somewhere and shared it with everyone else. It was the wrong version. The only version you can buy—which is what I bought, for $4.99 on Amazon—is the second edition, which had corrections, updates, and the latest science. The EPUB version they all used was the original edition.

Vox Day’s Prediction

Will: Vox Day made a prediction on his blog on September 26th, the day after our last live session: “My response is fairly simple and straightforward. I’ll be happy to talk to her or to whomever and explain these things. I do not expect anyone to actually (a) talk to me or (b) read the book. I don’t know what it is about biologists, population geneticists, and other science enthusiasts, but they always seem to imagine they can effectively critique anything without bothering to actually learn anything about it.”

I was really hoping this prediction would not come true.

Wright-Fisher, Moran, and Day’s Selective Turnover Coefficient

Will: Zach said: “There are two classic models—the Wright-Fisher model and the Moran model. In its classic sense, the Wright-Fisher model does not have overlapping generations. But you can equate the two by setting the population size (the N value) in the Wright-Fisher model to an effective population size and you just scale that effective population size by the slowdown of drift due to overlapping generations. So even the Wright-Fisher model can account for overlapping generations.”

Zach is correct here. But since he didn’t read Probability Zero and doesn’t understand Day’s selective turnover coefficient d, he doesn’t know why it’s still necessary and why it captures something that N-sub-e misses.

Both models—Wright-Fisher and Moran—are answering this question: How fast does genetic drift move neutral alleles through the population?

Day’s selective turnover coefficient d is designed to answer an entirely different question: How fast does the entire gene pool turn over?

The d formula involves variables that simply have not been accounted for in standard population genetic models.

Now, if anyone out there wants to grab my attention and immediately build rapport with me, simply acknowledge and tip your hat to Vox Day for his selective turnover coefficient. It has essentially nothing to do with his Mittens argument that evolution by natural selection is mathematically impossible. So conceding this one should be relatively harmless.

Zach’s Calculation Errors

Will: Zach said, “This is going to be 76.8 multiplied by 252,000, and that’s how many mutations you’re actually going to have in that time period.” This was a mistake. And remember what Erica said—trusted creators are people who can own their mistakes. Zach is a trusted creator. He owned his mistake, and it’s in the video. He corrected himself: “Importantly, we can’t use 6.4—this is the diploid genome size—for the fixation rate, because you fix on a haploid genome. So it should be 3.2.”

This made me happy. But then a few seconds later he said, “I want to quickly clarify that value, but I also want to say that we can still use this value in the following derivations.” He referenced Perubski et al. 2025, saying they estimate an average of 152 de novo mutations every single generation, and dividing that in half for the haploid genome size gives 76—meaning the original number can still be used.

But this is a pretty significant error. The Perubski et al. number includes large structural variants, insertions, deletions, and duplications—not just single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Zach’s entire calculation on the whiteboard is explicitly about single nucleotide differences using a single nucleotide mutation rate. You can’t validate a SNP-only calculation with a number that includes large structural variation.

Once again, I could not find anyone in the thousands of comments who caught this. But you know who did catch it? Mike Griffiths. The billiards player.

The 38 Million Number

Will: Zach says we can fix 38 million differences between humans and chimps. That’s incorrect for three reasons.

First, the calculation is being run on the diploid genome size (76.8) instead of the haploid genome (38.4).

Second, minor: he’s using 252,000 generations instead of the d-coded size of 201,600.

Most importantly: neutral theory applies to the entire genome. Zach is using circular reasoning in assuming the neutral prediction of 35 million differences all fall perfectly into the divergent sites. In reality, the divergent sites are only 1.09% of the genome. So statistically, only 1.09% of the neutral substitutions would end up in the divergent zone. The proper formula would be: 15-some-odd-million × 35 million ÷ 3.2 billion (the size of the genome). So Zach’s original 38 million number is in actuality just 169,344.

Rate vs. Latency: The Highway Analogy

Will: Zach said: “Hopefully you can see a very glaring problem with this math. One is that it assumes that each mutation has to both arise and go to fixation before the next mutation can occur.”

Zach is incorrect here. Part of me has sympathy for him as he’s trying to critique a book he hasn’t read. But the other part of me struggles to have sympathy for the same reason—he’s trying to critique a book he hasn’t read.

When you calculate a rate such as an observed fixation rate, you are dividing the total number of generations observed by the total number of fixations over that period. This tells you how many generations elapsed per fixation on average, regardless of whether those fixations occurred sequentially or overlapped.

Vox Day’s calculation is a rate calculation. Zach thinks it is a latency calculation.

I can help everyone understand with a simple highway analogy. Imagine you were counting how many cars pass a red line in one hour, and you count 360 cars. How would you calculate the average rate? The numerator is the time (3,600 seconds), the denominator is the number of cars (360). So 3,600 ÷ 360 = 10 seconds per car. This is the exact same method Vox Day uses to calculate the average observed fixation rate. If you see this formula and say, “Well, that formula means the cars can only travel one at a time, like through a tunnel,” that is absolutely incorrect.

Vox Day’s calculation is not a latency calculation and is not assuming one fixation happens before another one starts. This was explicitly covered and anticipated in Probability Zero.

I’m not hammering on Zach here. I believe he is a trusted creator and he’s going to own these mistakes. We’re all just trying to get to the truth.

Mittens Is Not the Waiting Time Problem

Will: Dr. Dan says, “Like the waiting time problem, which—even though Vox Day has never heard of it—that’s the argument he’s making.” No. Mittens is not the waiting time problem. The waiting time problem refers to the significant amount of time required for beneficial genetic mutations to occur in a population. The Mittens argument isn’t concerned with mutation rates at all. It is an empirical audit of observable fixations. Mittens would be better referred to as the fixation problem.

The Bacteria Issue

Will: Dr. Maddie said the idea of applying the fixation rate from bacteria to human populations doesn’t work when you just take the average of the fixations out of the Lenski experiment and apply that as a fixation rate to the human population assuming all the mutations are happening in series.

No, it doesn’t assume mutations are happening in series. But let’s talk about the bacteria issue. I don’t know anyone who argues that humans fixate mutations faster than bacteria in terms of generations per fixation. I think it’s possible the audience walked away from that video thinking that is what was being argued. So I’m hoping Erica and the others can clarify whether or not they actually believe humans fixate mutations faster than bacteria.

Zach said something good: “The issue with using even conceptually the Lenski long-term evolution experiment for a fixation rate is that the Lenski long-term experiment begins with a bacterial population that is clonal and has no diversity.” Zach makes a really valid point here. This was also caught by Mike Griffiths, who brought it to my attention before this video was released.

Here’s Vox Day’s response, which I’m not claiming to understand:

“The polymorphism objection sounds legitimate until you think about what standing variation is. It’s not a warehouse of pre-adapted beneficial alleles waiting for their moment. It’s mostly neutral variation, which is why it’s still segregating. If those variants were beneficial, they’d have already swept to fixation. If they were deleterious, purifying selection would have removed them. What mutation-drift equilibrium gives you is a population full of genetic noise at low frequencies, not a head start on adaptation.”

I don’t understand this enough yet to know who’s right. But the main argument with the bacteria thing seems to be that Vox shouldn’t apply bacterial fixation rates to humans because bacteria are clonal and slow.

Dr. Michael Lynch—who I’m told is one of the most respected population geneticists in the field—has stated that bacteria are actually faster and more efficient at molecular adaptation than eukaryotes because of their population size advantage. He says: “Prokaryotes appear to be much more efficient than eukaryotes at promoting simple to moderately complex molecular adaptations.”

Mike Griffiths as Intermediary

Will: Mike Griffiths watched Erica and Zach’s presentation. He also bought Probability Zero. He watched Erica and Zach’s presentation twice and has a list of about a half-dozen questions and issues. I introduced Mike to Zach via email and Mike shared his list with Zach. Zach has yet to respond.

On the Probability Zero side, Mike has started reading Probability Zero and Vox Day’s scientific papers. He has a list of questions and issues for Vox as well. I asked Vox if he would respond to Mike, and he agreed. The three of us did a Zoom together last week, and after the Zoom, Mike sent his list to Vox.

I told Erica already that I do not rush things like this. I spent a very significant amount of time not only learning Vox Day’s arguments in Probability Zero, but also learning as much as I could about the math behind population genetics. I have since spent a good deal of time reviewing the responses from Erica, Zach, Dan, Maddie, and Grayson. There are significant errors that I trust will be owned and corrected. As such, the verdict is still out.

I will tell everyone I’m relying heavily on Mike Griffiths as well. I’m honestly giddy to get to be a bystander on his conversations with both Zach Hancock and Vox Day. Mike has legitimate concerns for both of them, and I’m extremely curious how they will both respond.

Will’s Conclusion

Will: I want to point out to everyone what stood out to me most the last few weeks after I mentioned Vox Day and Probability Zero.

The response I received was the exact opposite of what everyone has been telling me to do from the very beginning:

  • I’ve been told to focus on the data and science and not the person. Yet the vast majority of responses and comments I get are focused on Vox Day as a person and not the data and the science.
  • I’ve been told that Darwin’s racism has no relevance to evolution and that Fisher—of the Wright-Fisher model—being a eugenicist doesn’t make his math wrong. But that’s all I’m hearing about Vox Day.
  • I’ve been told to focus on understanding new things instead of just trying to refute them. But I see very few people trying to actually understand his arguments—just trying to refute them.
  • I’ve been told not to run to creationists hoping they can refute what Erica teaches me and to study what I’m taught. But all I’ve seen is everyone say, “I’m just gonna have Erica and Zach and whoever else refute this instead of looking into it.”

I think it’s important for what it’s worth to know what I’m experiencing and what I’m seeing from my perspective.

Erica’s Response

Erica: I have a lot of thoughts—like three pages of thoughts. I’m going to work through some of them, but I’m not going to get to everything because you have a hard stop at 7:00 and I want to get to the actual presentation and super chats.

I can understand your perspective on being frustrated with people’s response to Vox. I said this to you via email and I’ve voiced this to other people as well. I think you have to put yourself in other people’s shoes a little bit too, though. The reason Zach and I covered what we covered in that initial video is because that’s what you shared—that was in your PowerPoint. Our first video was obviously just in response to the PowerPoint we got from you. We didn’t have access to the book at that point. I hadn’t read the book at that time either, even the scant portion I did read, although I did read Mittens 3.0, which is available online for free and is supposed to be—according to Vox—the most up-to-date version of the argument. That’s also why in the second video we went over Mittens 3.0 in addition to the first version of Probability Zero, because that was according to him the strongest version of the argument.

I can understand your frustration, but I find it difficult to set aside a lot of his other beliefs in the same way one would for someone like Darwin or Fisher. In Darwin and Fisher’s case—and I said this to you via email—Fischer was a eugenicist and Darwin was racist. That’s factually true. Darwin was an abolitionist as well—he was progressive for his time—but that doesn’t change the fact that he lived within the context he lived in. But the work they did in science did stand on its own. Their work has stood the test of time, and Fisher and Darwin’s ideas are still being used today to make accurate predictions. I’ve not seen the same with Vox’s math.

This is something that people sympathetic to Vox have not appreciated, and I’ve yet to see him comment on it. The math that underpins standard population genetics has been used to accurately model real populations now. And there are like a billion of them, which is why I showed a slideshow of two dozen or however many it was. Point blank, full stop: if Vox is correct and traditional population genetics is incorrect, those papers shouldn’t exist. They shouldn’t be able to accurately model or even predict changes in real world populations.

I do still maintain that this is a waiting time problem. The waiting time problem in traditional creationist circles is a fixation problem. Mutation rate and fixation rate are used interchangeably a lot, inappropriately, as you would now know because you’ve read up on a lot of population genetics. But because they’re used interchangeably, it makes it seem like the waiting time problem is something distinct from this fixation problem. It’s not. You can go back to Doug Axe’s original paper in the early 2000s and see exactly this, which is why we’ve said this is a waiting time problem.

I’ll say too: the idea that he’s using the Lenski long-term evolution bacteria—which, as you accurately pointed out, are clonal and thus inappropriate for that reason—I don’t think anybody’s saying that bacteria quite literally fixate faster than humans do. That’s not my understanding. The problem is that in the Lenski experiment in particular, by their nature of beginning clonally and by their nature of not recombining, these two things are not analogous. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The numbers exist out there for eukaryotes—fruit flies, rats, humans. We have pedigree studies on real-world human populations: a grandparent, a parent, and their kid. And you can use that to model these populations into the past. They don’t match Vox’s math. And they don’t behave like bacteria.

To me, what rings out most severely is that he must rectify this math with the entire scientific community, and he won’t. I find that incredibly frustrating because he puts out the books and says, “This stands on its own,” but it’s never applied to any real-world populations.

I have to ask you this. I don’t understand how you could give him the benefit of the doubt for the other stuff. I can sit here and say I disavow Darwin for the shitty stuff he said. I disavow Fisher for the shitty stuff he said. I like their math, but I can recognize that in these areas, they’re bad people for holding these perspectives. And you’ve already said—just to be clear for everyone—Will said he disavows white supremacy and doesn’t think women should lose the right to vote and doesn’t think marital rape laws should be revoked. He said that up top. But I still think you’re being a little bit defensive of Vox, and I don’t understand how you could do that after watching the video that had a lot of this stuff in his own words. That’s confusing to me. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here because I think this series is a good thing.

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Cry, Conservative, Cry

If only someone had come up with an alternative to Wikipedia that permitted conservatives to contribute. If only…

Anyone can add information to the pages of Wikipedia, even without an account. However, senior volunteer editors have a tight grip on what remains. Oftentimes, information is removed minutes later if they don’t like it.

If that information comes from The Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, Breitbart, Media Research Center, O’Keefe, and others on the right, it will likely be removed.

Wikipedia editors have determined that almost every conservative news outlet is unreliable and disallowed their content in some fashion.

In fact, The Gateway Pundit finished a study on this, and it is worse than we thought.

LEFT SOURCES ALLOWED: 37 of 75 reviewed (49%).
RIGHT SOURCES ALLOWED: 2 of 75 reviewed (3%).

Since 2018, Wikipedia has created an ecosystem where left-leaning sources are favored. Of the 75 conservative outlets we listed, only 2 are approved as sources.

I no longer care at all what happens to conservatives. When it comes to doing anything beyond whatever is necessary to pick up a paycheck or coach a children’s team, they are the most useless creatures on the planet.

It’s not as if every single conservative commentator who ever cried about inaccuracies on their Wikipedia page didn’t know about Infogalactic. It’s not as if we didn’t actually offer them their own bio page that no one else could touch.

But because it wasn’t the primary, established, and mainstream option, they weren’t interested.

The most surprising thing about conservatives that I’ve learned over the years is that they have no actual principles. They just don’t like change from whatever it is they are accustomed to. The most hallowed “conservative” principles such as “free speech” and “freedom of religion” are actually satanic Enlightenment inversions of the policies that protected Christendom for centuries.

Which is why I am not, and am pleased to say that I have never been, a conservative. Because change is good when it is for the better. Change is good when it is in the service of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Never forget that Jesus Christ was himself an agent of change.

Infogalactic will be back one day. But it’s not going to be powered by conservatives. Or, for that matter, people.

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File 770 Discriminates Against Hispanics

It’s so terrible to see the way that the science fiction community is full of hatred and discriminates against Hispanics. Mike Glyer of File 770 actually apologized for running a basic convention report about the recent World Fantasy Convention that just happened to be written by a gentleman of Hispanic descent.

How can I run a review by Paul Weimer and a week later post something by Jon Del Arroz, a writer who’s persecuted him? (Or ever?) That was a terrible choice. I apologize. And how can I do that to Cat Eldridge, who is closely associated with this blog but was completely blindsided by the post. He works with Paul all the time and absolutely would not want us to be hosting JDA. I apologize to Cat, too.

A good apology would stop there, I think. Which I say because some people want to know why I did this in the first place. And an explanation at this point in an apology is usually a backdoor justification which makes the apology worthless. All I can say is the explanation is part of my contrition.

File 770 doesn’t have that many commenters, so it often feels like I do a lot of work and all that matters is if I mention someone’s hot button topic they will jump in to reprimand me for failing their purity test. Most of the time my skin is not so thin that I react. Sometimes it is. Resentment is the issue that drives most of the problems I have in life, and when I yield to it bad things happen.

I was going through just such a season of feeling picked on when Jon Del Arroz sent me his convention report. I combed through it expecting to find takes I would refuse to publish but it was rather vanilla. Nothing to object to but the byline.

This is obviously nothing more than pure anti-Hispanic racism on the part of Mr. Glyer. There was literally nothing to object to but a Hispanic name in the byline; it was a simple and straightforward news report devoid of any political content whatsoever, as you can see for for yourself.

World Fantasy Con 2026 Friday Review
Posted on October 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

By Jon Del Arroz: World Fantasy Convention opened Thursday at the Oakland MarriottCity Center, and Friday, the first full day, delivered the small, personal kind of gathering the convention is known for. I wasn’t able to attend Thursday because of having to get work done. Robert Silverberg was the main draw for me, and he did not disappoint.

The convention is a fraction of Worldcon’s size. Programming runs two or three panels at a time, the dealer room is modest, and the convention space is compact. Organizers have been citing 775 members on Facebook. At peak times on Friday the halls held roughly 200. The staff has the operation running smoothly and were all super nice and helpful, from the info desk to programming to the dealer room, and attendees I passed all seemed to be having a good time.

The morning opened with a panel on the changing publishing world. The lineup was Silverberg, Josh Wilson from The Fabulous magazine, Teresa DeLucchi, director of marketing at Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press, Betsy Wollheim, and Stephen Jones.

The panelists agreed that everything in the business is up in the air and very different than ever. They discussed the trend toward sprayed edges on books that began in the pandemic, and cited that they thought the trend had peaked, which I find entertaining and think look great and add a lot to the presentation of books. They also said physical books are staging a bigger comeback because ebooks have become so prevalent and normalized, so people want something physical and cool to hold. That matches what I see in the market: readers want premium deluxe editions, and more publishers are making them.

AI produced the panel’s one real disagreement. Jones called it inevitable and asked why anyone bothers fighting it. DeLucchi argued people should not be using it. Jones has the better of that argument. AI is not going away, and people will not stop using it. It cleans up typos fast, and it has plenty of uses that never touch the creative work. He believes eventually AI will replace editors entirely for the most part.

The AI exchange led Silverberg to talk of copy editors, and he did not hold back. He once had a copy editor “fix” a sentence he had deliberately left unfinished, and he had to get it changed back. His verdict: “I hate copy editors because I know what I’m doing.” He added that Harlan Ellison once had a copy editor change a pile of his text wholesale, and that it did not go well for the copy editor.

He also talked about meeting John W. Campbell. The business used to be personal, he said, and now it is detached and run by email. The panel noted that unlike the days of building relationships with editors to buy stories, Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld buys stories only through open submissions, not by soliciting authors, so a relationship with the editor doesn’t get you a sale. Everyone goes through the same slush process. Silverberg described walking into Campbell’s office as being like going to church and meeting God. When he got to call Campbell by his first name, he thought the roof would fall in.

The dealer’s hall was modest but with a lot of cool stuff. Tachyon Publishing had a big presence there with a lot of works that were tempting, especially form Peter Beagle’s catalog. Cross Genre Books, a Portland dealer, had a deep rare-book stock: signed Jack Vance, signed Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Anne McCaffrey, and plenty of Heinlein. I spoke with Anthony Eichenlaub, vice president of SFWA, who had a table in the room. Artist John Picacio also set up there, and he kept a line most of the time I passed, with fans buying prints.

In the afternoon I went to a reading with Bruce McAllister, Charlie Jane Anders, and Caroline Yoachim. McAllister is a long time writer who has done wonderful work and does not get enough credit in the field these days despite plenty of award nominations for his work. Anders really worked the room before reading from a forthcoming publication in 2027 that involves vampires and time travel, thanking the moderator and the audience and getting everyone applauding, and the crowd responded in kind.

What’s great is how many of the attendees are there just as fans and not a full slate of scheduled speaking. I ran into Robin Hobb and Tad Williams, among other big names. Peter Beagle held a small meetup that filled before I could sign up, and I hope to catch him another way before Sunday. A bookbinding workshop, where attendees bound their own books, also looked good, and I missed it for scheduling reasons.

Friday night also holds a mass autographing session. Silverberg and Jones are expected to unveil an anthology there, with advance review copies on hand. Saturday brings Silverberg’s interview panel, which I expect to be a highlight of the con as well. The World Fantasy Awards banquet is Sunday to cap everything off. 

All in all, it was an excellent Friday, and World Fantasy Convention delivered. 

Now, I have zero interest in any future accommodation with the SF-SJWs, not because they quite rightly hate and fear me, but because they are such a collection of irrelevant mediocrities that there isn’t a single one of them that I would ever deem worthy of publishing in ebook, let alone in fine deluxe leather. When Castalia House is publishing excellent authors like Eiji Yoshikawa, Benito Perez Galdos, Zenaide Fleuriot, Unno Juza, and Nomura Kido in English for the first time ever, how could we possibly care about these sub-trivial SF/F wannabes who don’t even understand what science fiction is and what it is not.

Unfortunately, Mike Glyer has forgotten that his proper role is that of a science fiction historian, not a racial gatekeeper, and while it’s understandable that he would eventually fold under the hateful pressure of the yapping SJWs, it is a mistake on his part. Because, as a very kind and gentle dark lord once said, an apology is nothing more than a guilty plea in their beady little eyes.

And they are irrelevant anyhow. Despite their best efforts, Castalia House already publishes more and better titles than Tor or Baen. I will not be surprised if within three years, Castalia House is the biggest science fiction-related publisher in the world not named “Amazon”.

Sign up for Castalia Unlimited to find out why.

DISCUS ON SG

Top US Military Strategist Fired

Considering that the US military managed to lose 18 military bases in an offensive action, one would hope that it is looking for better strategists than those upon whom it has been relying.

The Pentagon has fired its top military strategist as Washington draws up contingency plans for a possible escalation of hostilities with Iran.

Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia has been removed from his position as director for strategy, plans, and policy (J5) on the Joint Staff, a spokesman confirmed late Wednesday, following media reports of his dismissal. His predecessor, Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee, was forced into retirement a year ago amid reported friction with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine. Sylvia previously served as vice director of the J5.

The Pentagon did not explain Sylvia’s departure. His responsibilities included developing military strategies and plans to advise the chairman and the US president. He joins nearly two dozen senior military and civilian officials removed during Hegseth’s tenure.

The problem, of course, is threefold. First, this is a war that is manifestly not in the US national interest. Second, the shift to 5GW missile-and-drone-based warfare renders all previous strategies at least potentially irrelevant. Third, it is never helpful to have an allied nation calling the shots and dictating a military’s primary objectives.

This is why the war on Iran was obviously foolish and why success in that war was very low-probability from the start. The US military needs a complete reset, and replacing its top strategist is only the first in a very long chain of necessary decisions if the USA wants to remain a major regional military power.

And the sooner that it realizes it is no longer a global superpower, the better.

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