The Birth Rate Discourse is Retarded

Because no one, on either side of the permissible political discourse, is willing to address the obvious:

Here’s why this topic is so difficult to talk about intelligently in public:

The biggest predictor of fertility decline appears to be the education and employment of women.

In my experience, only the hard-left and hard-right are really willing to say this out loud, and both throw it in your face as if it ends the conversation — as if it either provides an obvious solution, or renders the whole subject unspeakable.

Of course, it does neither.

The only societies that are not in terminal, existential demographic decline are in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Islamic world. (The lone exception, Israel, is a national socialist state on a permanent war footing: the Israelis still have a very clear “us” and “them”.) Even these are merely 10-50 years behind the global trend, and declining at far greater speed than nations that started sooner.

The (unserious) implication from the Right is that if society could just get back to Putting These Broads in Their Place, then everything could get back to normal.

But positive-TFR countries aren’t modestly poorer, or modestly more conservative.

Our hyper-modern barrenness is not a function of “too many lady CEOs” or “too many lady PhDs”.

When we say that demographic collapse correlates with women’s education and employment, we mean that it correlates at the level of “escaping subsistence agriculture” and “having indoor plumbing” and “being taught to read”.

Notice how even those willing to address the unspeakable can’t bring themselves to admit the obvious and appeal to the anecdotal evidence of that one woman in the office with a college degree who has three kids. The correct diagnosis does provide an obvious solution, or at least, an obvious part of the solution. But when we observe that there isn’t an advanced society that isn’t actively committed to making the problem worse, then it’s readily apparent that the problem will not be solved, that indoor plumbing and other luxuries of the late 20th century will be reserved to the elite, and the problem of excessive education is a self-solving one, as anyone who has spoken to a recent female college graduate can readily attest.

Progress not only isn’t inevitable, it is a self-refuting concept. And 95 percent of the human race has zero need of a college education. Hell, my biggest single regret is not dropping out of college during the winter break of my sophomore year.

And for those who insist that they found one study by one female scientist that proves college-educated women are having more children than non-college educated women – and I’ll bet she only counted women who completed their degrees and not those who attended between one and seven years of college without doing so – I would merely point out that the thirteenth year of education is not the dividing line for fertility collapse anywhere on the planet.

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Gas Prices Aren’t High Enough?

It’s almost as if Short Fake Trump wants everyone around the world to hate his administration:

China has condemned the latest expansion of US sanctions against Russia, including potential tariffs of up to 100% on major buyers of Russian energy, vowing to take “all necessary measures” to safeguard its national interests. US President Donald Trump signed the sweeping legislation on Friday. Among other measures, the bill authorizes secondary sanctions against the five largest buyers of Russian crude oil and natural gas. It does not explicitly name major importers such as China or India.

We paid 21 percent more for diesel today than last week. These idiotic wars on Iran and Russia are devastating all the Western economies. And they’re wholly unnecessary; at this point, Americans and Europeans will be demanding that someone give Tehran nuclear weapons just to bring the whole charade to an end.

It’s eminently clear at this point that the “mad mullahs” are more restrained and rational than the Clown Worlders. It’s also clear that whoever may be in the White House, it isn’t Donald Trump.

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Zero Sympathy

Hall of Fame voter and legendary NFL writer Peter King protests the changes to the Pro Football Hall of Fame voting system:

Our good friend and former colleague, Peter King, spent 32 years on the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s selection committee. He has concerns about the recent decision to slash the panel from 50 to 28.

The reductions came with no explanation as to shrinking the number of voters or as to the voters who were kept and those who were removed. There’s no reason that fewer voters will make the process any better. King believes that one specific move will make it worse.

“That Rick Gosselin, the most conscientious and well-researched member of the [Hall of Fame] selection committee I saw in my 32 years as a voter, has been removed from the voting group gives me doubts about the future of the Hall,” King said on Twitter. “It’s outrageous.”

I still miss Peter King’s MMQB column, but he just doesn’t have a case here. The Hall of Fame voters did this to themselves when they self-righteously denied Bill Belichick unanimous first-ballot entry to the Hall of Fame. They lost ALL their credibility, and now no one will support them.

This and the seizure of Nestle assets in Russia are really two different applications of the same concept. If you behave irresponsibly for performative reasons, your ability to do so will be curtailed.

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This Week’s Releases

Since we remain limited to publishing ten books per week on Amazon, the complete, unabridged set of Eiji Yoshikawa’s epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms will not be available until next Friday. But it was a very productive week nevertheless, since six of the ten books released have never been available in English before; I particularly recommend The Mystery Planet Gan for anyone who enjoys classic science fiction of the Heinlein juvenile variety.

While the focus on published books was heavy on the Japanese this week, don’t be misled into thinking that the released books represent the fullness of our translation efforts, as we’re now increasing the translation rate to up to 30 books per week in preparation for the launch of Castalia Unlimited, our subscription-only, DRM-free epub store that we expect to launch in October with more than 500 titles available by the end of 2026. Please note that everyone who is a paid subscriber to the Castalia Library will have access to it from the start in case you want to avail yourselves of the weekly ebook release in the interlude.

We also will be announcing three print editions of Natsume Soseki novels, Kokoro, Botchan, and Sanshiro in the coming week, and we’re now working on the print edition of a two-volume set of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto by Eiji Yoshikawa, so rest assured that traditional readers will not be left out.

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The Cost of Taking Sides

The Swiss are being informed that taking sides against a major power on behalf of others is a very expensive proposition when those others lose:

President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian subsidiaries of Nestle, Auchan and Leroy Merlin placed under temporary management owing to Western support for Ukrainian strikes on Russian civilian and economic infrastructure.

Moscow introduced the temporary management mechanism in 2023 in response to Western companies leaving Russia and the seizure of Russian state and private assets abroad. Officials said it was intended to keep strategically important businesses operating and shield the economy from decisions by “unfriendly” countries.

On Thursday, Putin amended the 2023 decree to add the Russian assets of Nestle, Auchan and Leroy Merlin to the list. All three were transferred to L.E.V. Management, a business and management consultancy.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the companies’ home countries and their support for Kiev were major factors behind the decision. “We are talking about European companies, companies from unfriendly countries,” he told journalists on Friday. “These are unfriendly countries that are actively involved in military actions against our country,” Peskov said, adding that some also support Ukrainian strikes “against our civilian economic infrastructure.”

The Swiss alarm over why they just lost a fairly significant asset as an inevitable result of their own actions would be amusing if it wasn’t so ominous for the future. There is no such thing as performative belligerence. If you attack a nation’s economy with sanctions, they will punish you for that, sooner or later.

Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, speaking on behalf of the government, said in a statement that it’s “worried” about the seizure of Nestlé’s assets. It’s working with Nestlé “toward the reversal of the compulsory administration,” it said.

Neutrality is what once made Switzerland the wealthiest country in the world. Kowtowing to the United States and the European Union has already cost them dearly and caused the failure of one of their two major banks; one hopes that the Swiss people will keep this in mind and limit the federal government’s disastrous forays into belligerence by strengthening its official neutrality structure in their upcoming vote.

As for the idea that Putin did this in order to influence the constitutional vote, there is no chance that Russia cares one way or another. This is simply a reaction to actions already committed; if the Swiss choose to engage in further foolish provocations and act like an EU puppet province, Russia will continue to treat them like an enemy. I suspect this is the real reason for the seizure:

Bern has also considered easing restrictions on the re-export of Swiss-made weapons to Ukraine.

Which is really not a great idea when Ukraine has already lost the war, NATO has shown itself to be a paper tiger on multiple fronts, and BRICS is rapidly demonstrating that it, and not Clown World, is the economic entity that matters. International diplomacy is not an appropriate venue for virtue-signaling.

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He Never Read the Book

Oh, Sweet St. Darwin, but it’s now it’s become clear that Dennis McCarthy has absolutely no idea what he’s even talking about with regards to evolution, natural selection, genetic drift, Probability Zero, MITTENS, or my case against evolution by natural selection. All this time, and all of these attempts to attack an irrelevant probability calculation, and he never even knew what the fundamental argument of the book is, much less understood it well enough to criticize it, as he recently demonstrated in the comments of his own site.

Stephen: I can’t speak for Vox, but there’s a difference between never occurring and being the primary mechanism. It’s been a while since I read the book. The math includes NS in the calculation so NS can occur, just as walking from NY to LA can occur, but is that enough? My understanding of the argument is that even granting that NS plays a role in the process, the conclusion is it’s not enough to get you to the final destination given the allotted time. Same goes for drift and a combination of both. The argument isn’t NS and drift never occur.

Dennis McCarthy: Stephen writes: “Vox is specifically attacking natural selection as the primary creative cause.” Stephen then writes: “I can’t speak for Vox”. Well, then stop trying to. But if you and Vox do agree Darwin was correct and that species can transform due to natural selection, I welcome you to the winning side. My entire proof was proving the elegance of the theory, its irrefutability, and that there has essentially never been any giant transformative leaps, but that it’s microevolution all the way down.

Stephen: I tried in the first comment, and made a point to not try in the next one. It’s not difficult to understand.

Dennis McCarthy: Yes, Vox tried to make the claim that natural selection did not have enough time, but never once challenged natural selection or rate of beneficial mutations. Instead, he focused exclusively on neutral mutations and Kimura’s theory— and was wrong about that, as I showed. Do you have some point here? Do you want to challenge my math?

Stephen: “Vox tried to make the claim that natural selection did not have enough time, but never once challenged natural selection” He tried but didn’t try??? Genuinely don’t understand this.

Dennis McCarthy: His incorrect equations focused on rate of neutral mutations–which has nothing to do with natural selection (or beneficial mutations).

VD: Dennis, it now appears that you not only didn’t read the book, but you still don’t even know what I’m talking about. Do you accept that natural selection cannot possibly account for the genetic differences between chimp and human? That is my core argument. Kimura and neutral theory don’t even begin to enter into it. I have directly challenged natural selection. I have directly asserted that Darwin was incorrect, wrong, and innumerate. I am, in fact, asserting that natural selection was not responsible for the origin of any species anywhere on Planet Earth.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is not only not “irrefutable” but it has already been refuted. It has been absolutely, conclusively, and comprehensively refuted. And now anyone can readily confirm that Darwin’s math doesn’t math for themselves.

From PROBABILITY ZERO:

The theory of evolution by natural selection has never been subjected to a quantitative audit against the actual scale of genetic divergence revealed by genomic data. We present MITTENS (Mutation, Isolation, Time, Transmission, Environment, Natural Selection, Sex), a framework identifying seven necessary conditions for speciation through natural selection. Applying this framework to human-chimpanzee divergence using the telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies of Yoo et al. (2025)—which document approximately 410 million total genomic differences between the two species—we calculate that natural selection can accomplish at most 180 fixations on the human lineage given 252,000 generations and 1,400 generations per fixation (the fastest empirical rate ever measured in any organism). This represents 0.000088% of the approximately 205 million fixations required on the human lineage. The shortfall is 1,139,000-fold. Scaling analysis across 18 species pairs spanning the tree of life confirms universal failure for sexually reproducing lineages. The mechanism does not work.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you always read the whole damn book before you offer even one little word in criticism of it, because no matter how confident you are in your position, no matter how absolutely certain you are of yourself, you’re going to look incredibly retarded when it inevitably becomes obvious to everyone that you aren’t even in the same zip code as the subject of the discussion.

As I told Dennis in his own comments, he’s not tall enough for this ride.

If you don’t even read the book you’re claiming to have refuted, then you’re not a serious individual and you don’t merit any intellectual respect whatsoever. That’s just retarded.

This reminds me a little of that moment back in the day when someone praised Terence McKenna for his eloquent metaphor about the DMT machine elves, and McKenna started screaming at the guy “it’s not a metaphor, the elves are real! The elves are real!” and everyone there suddenly realized that McKenna wasn’t the brilliant poet they’d all perceived him to be, but a burned-out druggie with an LSD-fried brain.

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A Mathematician’s Review

A significant figure in the Intelligent Design set, William Dembski of the Discovery Institute, set out to review Probability Zero, then wisely handed the book over to a Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Stockholm University to look more closely at the numbers on his behalf. This is what the Swedish mathematician concluded, in marked contradiction to the critiques of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholar:

First of all, I want to congratulate Day on a well written book. The mathematical arguments are explained in a pedagogical way, yet they reveal deep insights into population genetics — the mathematical tool for evolutionary theory. It is also courageous to follow the tradition of the Wistar Institute conference 1966 and put forward mathematical challenges to evolutionary theory…

Vox Day concludes that since Neo-Darwinism relies on natural selection acting on mutations with a selective advantage, Neo-Darwinism cannot explain the observed genetic divergence between humans and chimps by means of common ancestry, within a time frame of 9 million years. I agree with this conclusion, also after adjusting the MITTENS equation for the different mutation rates of humans and E. coli…

Vox Day has written an excellent book where mathematical tools are used to showcase that unguided evolution (Neo-Darwinism or the neutral theory of evolution) cannot be used as an argument for common ancestry between humans and chimpanzees. In my view these conclusions remain even after some adjustments to the MITTENS equations.

Now, note that these reviews were both of the first edition of the book. I have since sent both of them the second edition, which contains the updates to the genomic mappings, but not my latest revisions involving Kimura’s equations and their ramifications for neutral theory, population genetics, and the molecular clock.

You can download the mathematician’s full paper in PDF format here. I would merely note that the problem with postulating how a larger genome might afford more opportunities for fixations is that such a postulate doesn’t incorporate the bottleneck necessarily imposed by the limits of sexual reproduction, which is why the speed of fixation in humans when measured in generations has never, and will never, approach the speed of fixation in bacteria.

It should be interesting to see what happens to the evolution debate now that the most staunch critics of Neo-Darwinianism are armed with more effective intellectual weaponry. Because math doesn’t lie, and while it’s possible get away with waving your hands and invoking fairy tales in response to logical criticism, no amount of fairy tales will make your numbers add up correctly when the maths don’t math.

I should also mention that I don’t have a position on common descent vs uncommon descent. I have a vague suspicion that Intelligent Genetic Manipulation utilized a melange of genetic material, including both proto-chimps and proto-pigs, which would technically fall more on the uncommon descent side, but is so far outside that debate that I don’t see how it even applies. I simply don’t have anything strong enough to be described as an opinion on the matter.

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The Translations List

Someone asked for the complete list of translations by Castalia House, so I’ve added a page on the Library site that will be regularly updated; it can also be accessed from the top of the site by clicking on Translations. I suppose I can probably add a link on the sidebar here as well; I’ll do that shortly. And, of course, you can always flip through the carousel on the sidebar to see the latest additions: today’s were Kojiki: The Record of Ancient Matters and Sangokushin Book 4. And on Saturday’s I’ll provide a list of the ten translations published this week, complete with links.

Please note that not all books that have been translated have been released yet, and not all of them even appear on the list. We have to maintain a few surprises, after all. I’m told we’re still on track to launch the new Unlimited site in October, but, as always, don’t take our initial estimated dates too seriously.

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Odessa Confirmed

I’ve always believed that obtaining control of the city and the port of Odessa is central to ending the Russia’s war against Kiev and Clown World. This recent conversation between John Mearsheimer and Sergei Larvrov in Moscow, as reported by Larry Johnson, tends to confirm that:

A week ago Monday I had dinner with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. I was in the company of John Mearsheimer, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Alastair Crooke. The dinner was informal and genuinely candid, and Lavrov answered questions directly — and anyone who has sat with Mearsheimer knows he does not ask soft ones. I came away with two clear impressions.

The first is that Russia’s negotiating position toward the West has not moved an inch since Putin addressed his foreign ministry on June 14, 2024. In that speech he made the terms explicit, and they are the terms still on the table: the West must recognize Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, along with Crimea, as permanent Russian territory. These former Ukrainian oblasts are not going back. In Moscow that is treated not as an opening bid but as a settled fact. Beyond it, Russia is building buffer zones through its advances in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk. Those territories could, in time, be incorporated as well — though officials frame that as something that would follow a vote or plebiscite rather than a foregone conclusion. It is not formally on the menu. But it is, in my read, very much in the cards.

The second impression is that the space for a negotiated settlement is extremely narrow — narrower than Western capitals want to admit — because Russia is simply not willing to make the concessions the West requires, and does not believe it has to. My own assessment, after listening to how officials here talk, is that the war effort will not stop until Odessa and Kyiv are firmly under Russian control. I hold that as a judgment, not a certainty. But nothing I heard this week moved me off it.

I’ll disagree with Larry about Kiev. I don’t believe Russia wants it, and the rump state of Western Ukraine will need a capital city. But Odessa is too important economically to not take control of it.

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The Math is Too Hard

Dennis McCarthy is still providing what he thinks is proof of evolution by natural selection while ignoring the conclusive mathematical disproof of both evolution by natural selection and evolution by genetic drift.

My previous repost on Vox Day’s Probability Zero: The Mathematical Impossibility of Evolution by Natural Selection has attracted attention from Day, himself, who responded with a blog post cheekily titled: “Do Try to Keep Up, Dennis”.

In my prior post and this one, I provide proof upon proof that evolution by natural selection not only has to happen, but that it also leads to speciation. And these arguments represent only a small sample of the many independent lines of evidence supporting evolution. We could provide thousands of separate arguments from island biogeography alone, along with the enormous body of evidence from the fossil record, genetics, comparative anatomy, embryology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Vox Day, like other intelligent-design advocates, ignores this vast body of evidence entirely and instead focuses on one or two obscure arguments in the hope of finding a single kill shot that will somehow allow him to dismiss the entire library of facts. The more obscure and technical the argument, the better, because it dazzles Creationist laymen.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to meaningfully respond to these arguments. I have repeatedly come out and said “I don’t know how X, Y, and Z happened. I have no idea, but I can prove it didn’t happen by A or by B.”

Dennis is not addressing my arguments at all, although he appears to think he is, and I’m certainly not addressing his because I have neither an answer nor an explanation. But my mathematical arguments are neither obscure nor technical, they are fundamental and conclusive.

It’s now obvious that he didn’t read Probability Zero closely enough to understand its primary argument, and he also doesn’t understand its secondary argument because he doesn’t fully comprehend the difference between a) natural selection and b) genetic drift aka neutral substitution. He is repeatedly conflating the two in his attempts to criticize the specific probability of the Darwillion concept, which he has absolutely no need to do. As I have said from the start, the Darwillion is nothing more than a rhetorical absurdity to demonstrate how far off the biologists are from the mathematical realities of the situation.

I can, and do, go into great detail in these matters in my papers on Zenodo and in the two books. And yes, there most certainly is a degree of circularity with regards to Kimura’s equations and the molecular clock estimates for the CHLCA, but that means the probability is that there is considerably LESS than 6-7 million years to account for those observed 410 million base-pair differences.

Note that he didn’t even answer the first, easiest, and most basic question about the relevant math: what is 410,000,000 divided by 6,000,000?

If he can’t even bother to do that, then he’s not capable of engaging in this discussion. What he needs to do is to propose a rate of either a) fixation through natural selection or b) fixation through neutral substitution that is a) fast enough to account for the observable genetic differences in the time allowed and b) observable in nature or the laboratory.

He won’t be able to do that. No one can. The math is clear on that. The fact of the matter is that neither evolution by natural selection nor by genetic drift can possibly account for the origin of ANY mammalian species, and quite possibly any species of any kind. The math and the science are both conclusively settled. But the fact that we now know how it didn’t happen tells us nothing about how it did happen.

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