Preface to The Frozen Gene

I’m very pleased to announce that the world’s greatest living economist, Steven Keen, graciously agreed to write the preface to The Frozen Gene which will appear in the print edition. The ebook and the audiobook will be updated once the print edition is ready in a few weeks.

Evolution is a fact, as attested by the fossil record, and modern DNA research. The assertion that evolution is the product of a random process is a hypothesis, which has proven inadequate, but which continues to be the dominant paradigm promulgated by prominent evolutionary theorists.

The reason it fails, as Vox Day and Claude Athos show in this book, is time. The time that it would take for a truly random mutation process, subject only to environmental selection of those random mutations, to generate and lock in mutations that are manifest in the evolutionary complexity we see about us today, is orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe, let alone the age of the Earth. The gap between the hypothesis and reality is unthinkably vast…

The savage demolition that Day and Athos undertake in this book of the statistical implications of the “Blind Watchmaker” hypothesis will, I hope, finally push evolutionary biologists to abandon the random mutation hypothesis and accept that Nature does in fact make leaps.

Read the whole thing there. There is no question that Nature makes leaps. The question, of course, is who or what is the ringmaster?

It definitely isn’t natural selection.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Reproducibility Crisis in Action

Now, I could not care less about the catastrophic state of professional science. Most scientists are midwits who are wholly incapable of ever doing anything more than chasing credentials, and the scientific literature ranges from about 50 percent to 100 percent garbage, depending upon the field. But I do feel sufficient moral duty to the great archive of human knowledge to bring it to the attention of the professionals when the very foundation upon what they’re basing a fairly significant proportion of their work is obviously, observably, and provably false.

So I submitted a paper calling attention to the fact that Kimura’s fixation model, upon which all neutral theory is based, is algebraically incorrect due to an erroneous cancellation in its derivation. In short, Kimura fucked up massively by assigning two different values to the same variable. In order to make it easy to understand, let me make an analogy about Democrats and Republicans in the US political system.

T = D + R, where D = 1-R.

This looks reasonable at first glance. But in fact, D stands for two different things here. It stands for both Democrats and it stands for Not Republicans. These two numbers are always going to be different because Democrats (47%) are not the same as Democrats + Independents (62%). So any derivation that cancels out D as part of an equation is always going to result in the equation producing incorrect results. Even for the most simple equation of the percentage of the US electorate that is divided into Democrats and Republicans, instead of getting the correct answer of 85, the equation will produce an incorrectly inflated answer of 100.

So you can’t just use D and D to represent both values. You would do well to use D and Di, which would make it obvious that they can’t cancel each other out. Kimura would have been much less likely to make his mistake, and it wouldn’t have taken 57 years for someone to notice it, if instead of Ne and Ne he had used Ne and Nc.

So, I write up a paper with Athos and submitted it to a journal that regularly devotes itself to such matters. The title was: “Falsifying the Kimura Fixation Model: The Ne Equivocation and the Empirical Failure of Neutral Theory” and you can read the whole thing and replicate the math if you don’t want to simply take my word for it.

Kimura’s 1968 derivation that the neutral substitution rate equals the mutation rate (k = μ) has been foundational to molecular evolution for over fifty years. We demonstrate that this derivation contains a previously unrecognized equivocation: the population size N in the mutation supply term (2Nμ) represents census individuals replicating DNA, while the N in the fixation probability (1/2N) was derived under Wright-Fisher assumptions where N means effective population size. For the cancellation yielding k = μ to hold, census N must equal Ne. In mammals, census populations exceed diversity-derived Ne by 19- to 46-fold. If census N governs mutation supply while Ne governs fixation probability, then k = (N/Ne)μ, not k = μ. This fundamental error, present in both the original 1968 Nature paper and Kimura’s 1983 monograph, undermines the theoretical foundation of molecular clock calculations and coalescent-based demographic inference. Empirical validation using ancient DNA time series confirms that the Kimura model systematically mispredicts allele frequency dynamics, with an alternative model reducing prediction error by 69%.

This is a pretty big problem. You’d think that scientists would like to know that any results using that equation are guaranteed to be wrong and want to avoid that happening in the future, right? I mean, science is all about correcting its errors, right? That’s why we can trust it, right?

Ms. No.: [redacted]
Title: Falsifying the Kimura Fixation Model: The Ne Equivocation and the Empirical Failure of Neutral Theory
Corresponding Author: Mr Vox Day
All Authors: Vox Day; Claude Athos

Dear Mr Day,

Thank you for your submission to [redacted]. Unfortunately, the Editors feel that your paper is inappropriate to the current interests of the journal and we regret that we are unable to accept your paper. We suggest you consider submitting the paper to another more appropriate journal.

If there are any editor comments, they are shown below.

As our journal’s acceptance rate averages less than half of the manuscripts submitted, regretfully, many otherwise good papers cannot be published by [redacted].

Thank you for your interest in [redacted].

Sincerely,

Professor [redacted]
Co-Chief Editor
[redacted]

Apparently showing them that their math is guaranteed to be wrong is somehow inappropriate to their current interests. Which is certainly an informative perspective. Consider that after being wrong for fifty straight years, they’re just going to maintain that erroneous course for who knows who many more?

Now, I don’t care at all about what they choose to publish or not publish. I wouldn’t be protecting the identities of the journal or the editor if I did. It’s their journal, it’s their field, and they want to be reliably wrong, that’s not my problem. I simply fulfilled what I believe to be my moral duty by bringing the matter to the attention of the appropriate authorities. Having done that, I can focus on doing what I do, which is writing books and blog posts.

That being said, this is an illustrative example of why you really cannot trust one single thing coming out of the professional peer-reviewed and published scientific literature.

DISCUSS ON SG

Dennis McCarthy’s Round 2

Dennis McCarthy has responded to my response to his initial critique:

“Ahh,” says the evolution-skeptic, “I don’t care about fossils or biogeography or stories about salamanders or moths. Vox Day has proved mathematically that it can’t happen, so I don’t even have to think about any of this.”

First, Vox Day’s central argument in Probability Zero concerns neutral mutation fixation rates, which says nothing about natural selection and is largely orthogonal to most of what we have been discussing. Even if Motoo Kimura’s neutral theory—and the equations Vox Day disputes—were entirely mistaken, that would not overturn Darwinian evolution, nor would it undermine any of the empirical facts or conclusions considered so far. Vox Day himself effectively concedes as much in his response:

And in the interest of perfect clarity, note this: Dennis McCarthy’s critique of Probability Zero is not, in any way, a defense of evolution by natural selection. Nor can it be cited as a defense of speciation or Darwinism at all, because neutral theory has as about as much to do with Darwin as the Book of Genesis

Actually, my full post response (like this one) did indeed defend evolution by natural selection. And the only reason I veered from the subject of Darwinism at all was to address Vox Day’s main mathematical arguments—and it is Day’s main arguments that are not relevant to Darwinism or evolution by natural selection. And this is true despite what Day frequently implies, what his readers persistently infer, and what the subtitle of Probability Zero plainly states.

Secondly, as I showed, his two main analyses were both flawed. He contended that it was essentially impossible, given the circumstances of mutation rates, population size, fixation-probability, etc., for the human lineage to have acquired 20 million fixed mutations in the nine million years since humans and chimpanzees last shared an ancestor.

As before, I invite those who are interested in participating in the discussion to read the whole thing there and comment on his site. I will refrain from responding to it until tomorrow. I will note that this is why it is important to read The Frozen Gene as well as Probability Zero, as the former completes the comprehensive case begun in the latter. I have, however, taken the liberty of correcting his cartoon.

By the way, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the print edition of TFG will feature a preface from a somewhat surprising source. The ebook will be updated accordingly, of course.

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 002

III. The Political Failures

The Enlightenment promised to place politics on a rational foundation. In place of the divine right of kings, the accidents of inheritance, and the weight of tradition, the people would be ruled more justly by a government grounded in reason and consent. The results of this centuries-long experiment are now in, and they do not vindicate those who advocated for it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, published in 1762, proposed that legitimate political authority rests upon an agreement among free individuals to submit to the general will. The concept was elegant and has proven remarkably durable as a legitimating fiction. But it was never anything more than a fiction. No actual contract was ever signed. No one has ever been consulted about its terms nor has anyone ever been permitted to negotiate them. The consent of the governed is presumed from the mere fact of residence and geographic location, which is to say, it is not consent at all but submission enforced by the impracticality of any alternative. The man who may freely leave a country provided he abandons his home, his family, his language, his livelihood, and everything he knows, is not free in any meaningful sense. He is merely presented with a choice between submission and exile, and given the universal jurisdiction claimed by some countries, he may not even have that.

This abstraction at the heart of social contract theory, the idea that rational individuals in some imaginary past are assumed to have agreed to certain specific terms, does precisely the work that rational argument can never do: it manufactures consent that was never given by anyone. And this manufactured consent has proven useful for its ability to justify anything. Just thirty years after the publication of the Social Contract, Robespierre was sending men to their deaths on the guillotine in the name of the general will. The Jacobins were not betraying Rousseau’s principles, to the contrary; they were applying them. If the general will is supreme, and if some enlightened vanguard is able to discern that will more clearly than the confused masses, then terror in the service of the general will is not tyranny, but liberation. The Revolution did not reject the social contract. It followed exactly where its logical premises led.

Representative democracy was meant to solve the problem of scale: direct democracy being impractical for large nations in the Eighteenth Century. Therefore, the people would elect representatives to deliberate on their behalf. The representatives would be constrained by accountability to their constituents, and the result would approximate the will of the people as closely as circumstances allowed.

Three centuries of practice have demonstrated the gap between theory and reality. The representatives are accountable not to the people but to the interests that fund their campaigns and the parties that control their advancement. The people are consulted every few years, presented with choices they did not make, between candidates selected by processes they do not control, on platforms that will be abandoned the moment they become inconvenient. Between elections, the permanent bureaucracy—elected by no one, accountable to no one—governs according to its own institutional logic. The people’s will, to the extent it can be determined, is an obstacle to be managed through media, education, and when necessary, simple disregard.

And direct democracy, which is now tenable due to technological advancement, is opposed everywhere by the representatives who claim to speak for the people. Referendums that consult the people directly are opposed by politicians and overturned by judges. The genuine will of the people is systematically thwarted by the Enlightenment’s parody of itself.

This anti-popular representative democracy is not a deviation from the democratic ideal; it is its mature expression. The Enlightenment theorists imagined that rational voters would deliberate on the common good and select wise representatives to enact sound policy. They refused to contemplate the way in which the structures of representative democracy would inevitably be captured by those with the strongest motivations to do so and the sufficient resources to control them. The will of the people is not expressed by modern democracy; it is manufactured by the elite, distributed by the media, channeled through one or another of the ruling party’s factions, and then imposed by the government.

The separation of powers was designed to prevent tyranny by dividing authority among competing branches. The executive, legislative, and judicial were supposed to check each other’s oversteps, ensuring that no single faction could dominate. This mechanism has proven altogether inadequate to its stated purpose. The branches have not remained in productive tension; they have merged into a single ruling apparatus with superficial divisions. The legislature delegates its authority to executive agencies and abdicates its responsibility to make difficult decisions. The judiciary legislates from the bench, discovering in ancient documents various rights, requirements, and limitations that none of its authors could ever have imagined. The executive acts unilaterally whenever the legislature proves inconvenient. The separation of powers has not contained government overreach, it has instead provided a complex machinery for diffusing responsibility and eliminating accountability while concentrating effective control.

What the Enlightenment theorists failed to take into consideration is that political structures do not operate upon rational principles, but upon incentives, interests, and the will to power. Parchment barriers, however cleverly designed, constrain only those who choose to be constrained. The Constitution of the United States has not prevented the emergence of a surveillance state, a long series of undeclared wars, the demographic adulteration of the nation, or the periodic disenfranchisement of half the citizenry through the two-party system. It has merely required that all of the developments that materially harm the very Posterity whose rights the Constitution was written to safeguard be dressed in constitutional language.

DISCUSS ON SG

Jeffrey Epstein is Still Alive

I’m not even remotely surprised by this news. The picture of the “corpse” they showed obviously wasn’t the same man. The nose wasn’t even close.

An anonymous 4chan poster said that Epstein was wheeled out of prison hours before his reported death

Subpoenas show that man was Roberto Grijalva, who was a lieutenant at the prison at this time

It appears Epstein really did get broken out of prison and flown to Israel

Remember, if the mainstream media reports it, then it isn’t true. It never is.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Collapse of the Liberal Order

The inevitable failure of the post-WWI liberal world order is increasingly obvious to everyone now, but they’re still not connecting it to the even more inevitable failure of the Enlightenment and its false ideals.

What was the clearest early sign for you that the unipolar order was beginning to fracture?

The theorists such as Huntington, Faye, and Pat Buchanan were all writing about the inevitable fracture in the early 1990s. But for me, there were three events that conclusively indicated that the unipolar world was cracking.

The 2014 annexation of Crimea marked the first real irreversible breach. This wasn’t merely territorial – it was civilizational. President Putin invoked the baptism of Kievan Rus in 988, positioning Russia as the Third Rome inheriting Byzantium’s mantle. While Western elites dismissed this as nothing more than manipulative propaganda, they missed the core signal: a major power was reorganizing its legitimacy around its own territorial hegemony based on religious-historical continuity rather than liberal democratic norms.

The second sign was China’s 2015 declaration of cyber sovereignty. When Beijing asserted that nations have an absolute right to regulate internet activities within their borders, it wasn’t fundamentally about censorship – it was about civilizational control over cyberspace. The split internet wasn’t a bug; it was the architecture of civilizational spheres reawakening through technology.

The third indicator was the 2016 Brexit vote paired with Trump’s election. Brexit represented the first time a globalist institution like the EU actually contracted and shrank. And Trump ran on a political platform that promised to dismantle the liberal international order. These weren’t isolated populist spasms but the first mass democratic repudiations of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, as he himself has admitted. The liberal order’s legitimacy collapsed not from external attack but from internal hollowing – its own populations voting against its continuance.

This is the deeper point that a lot of observers are missing. They’re still trying to figure out how the Enlightenment ideals in which they still believe can be implemented in whatever replaces the failing world order, but this is a fundamentally flawed perspective because it is the failure of the ideals that is causing the failure of the world order.

However, simply attempting to return to traditional ideals won’t work, not because the ideals are false, but because the knowledge upon which they are based and their practical applications are at least 300 years out of date. Hence the need for a new post-Enlightenment philosophy that is capable of serving as the intellectual foundation for humanity’s eventual post-crash recovery.

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Diversity Will Hunt You Down

This is what it making the coming demographic repairs both inevitable and unavoidable. Because Clown World is aggressively attempting to not only eliminate the right to free association, but every last vestige of the ability of white people to live amongst themselves in the style they prefer:

The British countryside is in the midst of a diversity drive after a government-commissioned report found it was too ‘white’ and ‘middle-class’.

Officials charged with managing some of the country’s best known beauty spots have laid out a series of proposals aimed at attracting minorities.

The plans follow a review, ordered by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), which warned the countryside was seen as ‘very much a white environment’ and risked becoming ‘irrelevant’ in a multicultural society.

In the wake of the report, officials representing National Landscapes – including the Cotswolds and Chilterns – have now published a series of management plans that detail their proposals to attract more minority communities. 

The Chiltern National Landscape will launch an outreach programme in Luton and High Wycombe targeted at Muslims.

One factor stopping ethnic minorities visiting was said to be ‘anxiety over unleashed dogs’.

Translation: they’re eventually going to try to ban dogs. I had no idea that leash laws were actually about imposing diversity on people.

The extremists of the younger generations are going to be a bit much for those of us who grew up comfortably indoctrinated in It’s a Small World Disney propaganda. For Generation X, our role is largely going to be to shut up, stay out of their way, and let them get on with fixing the problem as they see fit. Because we all know who their patron saint is going to be, and it isn’t St. George.

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PZ Print Editions

Both the English and the French versions of the #1 Biology, Evolution, and Genetic Science bestseller Probability Zero are now available in hardcover.

Probabilité zéro: l’Impossibilité mathématique de l’évolution par sélection naturelle has also been translated and published in French by Editions Alpines.

Both hardcovers are also available from NDM Express. We’re placing the initial print order tomorrow, so if you want one direct, order it today and figure about 2-3 weeks for it to get to you. Amazon hasn’t placed their stocking order yet, so it’s probably going to be a similar delivery timeframe.

A German translation is nearly complete and will be available for order before the end of the month.

In other PZ-related news, the complete paper, to which I referred yesterday in the post about Dawkins and the fish of Lake Victoria, is now available for review. It is a multi-taxa test of MITTENS across the tree of life which convincingly demonstrates that the throughput problem is systematic and is not limited to any one divergence between species.

The Universal Failure of Fixation: MITTENS Applied Across the Tree of Life

The MITTENS framework (Mathematical Impossibility of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection) previously demonstrated a 220,000-fold shortfall between required and achievable fixations for human-chimpanzee divergence. A reasonable objection holds that this represents an anomaly—perhaps something about the human lineage uniquely violates the model’s assumptions. We test this objection by applying MITTENS systematically across the tree of life: great apes, rodents, birds, fish, equids, elephants, and insects. Across 18 species pairs spanning generation times from two weeks (Drosophila) to 22 years (elephants) and divergence depths from 12,000 years (sticklebacks) to 100 million years (bacteria), we find that every sexually reproducing lineage fails by 2–5 orders of magnitude. The sole exception is
Escherichia coli, which passes due to asexual reproduction (eliminating recombination delay), complete generational turnover (d = 1.0), and astronomical generation counts (~1.75 trillion over 100 MY). Rapid radiations thought to exemplify evolutionary potential—Lake Victoria cichlids (500+ species in 15,000 years), post-glacial sticklebacks—show among the largest shortfalls: 141,000× and 216,000× respectively. Short generation times, which should favor the standard model by providing more opportunities for fixation, do not rescue it. The pattern is systematic and universal. The substitution-fixation model fails not for one troublesome comparison, but for every sexually reproducing lineage examined. The mechanism does not work.

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Veriphysics: the Treatise 001

The Failure of the Enlightened Mind and the Path Toward Veriscendance

PART ONE: THE FAILURE OF THE ENLIGHTENED MIND

I. Introduction: The Unraveling

The twenty-first century has not been kind to the Enlightenment. One by one, the foundational concepts that shaped the modern world have been tested against reality over time and found wanting. The social contract, the invisible hand, the marketplace of ideas, the arc of progress, democracy, the separation of powers, freedom of speech, and the rights of Man: each of these ideas have been weighed in the balance of recent centuries and discovered to be, at best, a partial truth elevated far beyond its proper domain, and at worst, a deceptive illusion that fueled three centuries of unnecessary human suffering.

This is not a new development, although recently its pace has accelerated. The French Revolution, that first great experiment in applied Enlightenment ideals, devoured its own children within a decade of the storming of the Bastille. The utilitarians promised a calculus of happiness and yet somehow never managed to produce one. The classical economists assured us that free trade would enrich all nations, while the nations that believed them and applied their advice watched their industries hollow out and their wages stagnate. The democratic theorists proclaimed that representative government would express the will of the people, while the people increasingly observe that their will is never consulted on any matter of consequence and is actively subverted on every side even as the franchise is consistently expanded.

What we are witnessing is not the corruption of Enlightenment ideals by bad actors, nor their betrayal by insufficient commitment. We are witnessing something more fundamental: the inevitable consequences of false premises that were flawed from the beginning. The Enlightenment is not failing because its enemies have resisted it. The Enlightenment has failed because its internal contradictions, long hidden by inherited cultural capital and technological achievement, have finally become impossible to ignore.

To understand why this collapse was inevitable, we must first understand what the Enlightenment actually is, not as a historical period, but as a philosophical project with identifiable premises and inherent characteristics.

II. The Core Premises of the Enlightened Mind

The Enlightenment was never a single doctrine, and its principal figures disagreed on much. Locke and Hobbes proposed incompatible theories of political authority. Hume and Kant held irreconcilable views on the foundations of knowledge. The French philosophes and the Scottish moralists diverged on questions of sentiment and reason. Yet beneath these disputes lay a set of shared commitments that defined the project as a whole and distinguished it from what came before.

The first and most fundamental of these commitments was the autonomy of reason. Medieval and ancient philosophy had understood reason as a faculty that participates in a larger order, an order that is cosmic, divine, and natural. This natural order was not created by reason, and it is not only beyond reason, it is not an order that Reason can fully comprehend. Reason was viewed as an important tool for apprehending truth, it was not the source of truth itself. The Enlightenment inverted this relationship. It defined reason to be self-grounding, answerable to no authority outside itself, and entirely capable of establishing its own foundations and validating its own conclusions. Revelation, tradition, and inherited wisdom were demoted from fundamental sources of knowledge to flawed objects of suspicion, accepted only insofar as they could justify themselves before the tribunal of reason.

The second commitment followed from the first: the sovereignty of the individual knower. If reason is autonomous, then the thinking subject becomes the starting point of all inquiry. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum is the emblematic concept: the philosopher, having doubted everything that can be doubted, finds certainty only in the fact of his own thinking. From this atom of certainty, all knowledge must be reconstructed. The individual mind, not the community, not tradition, not the Church, becomes the foundation upon which everything else must be built.

Third was the mathematization of nature. The spectacular applied success of Newtonian physics gave birth to the idea that the universe was a vast mechanism, operating according to invariable laws expressible in mathematical form. What had been understood as a cosmos, an ordered whole, imbued with purpose and meaning, was transformed into a lifeless, pointless machine: intricate, predictable, and devoid of inherent significance. This mechanical conception promised complete explicability: given sufficient knowledge of initial conditions and governing laws, every aspect of it could, in principle, be predicted and explained. There was no remainder, no mystery, no domain intrinsically beyond potential human investigation.

Fourth was the distinction of fact and value. If nature is mechanism, it contains no purposes, no oughts, no shoulds, and no requirements. Facts are one thing and values are another. Science tells us what is; it cannot tell us what should be. This seemed, at first, a modest and reasonable division of labor. But instead, it created a chasm that has never been bridged despite the best efforts of philosophers and scientists to do so. If facts and values are fundamentally distinct, then values can never be derived from facts, and ethics are reduced to expressions of sentiment, social conventions, or an arbitrary act of individual will. The Enlightenment bequeathed to modernity a picture of the world in which knowledge and morality have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Fifth, and perhaps most seductive, was the doctrine of inevitable progress. History was no longer a cycle, or a degeneration, but an constant ascent toward material godhood. Knowledge accumulates, technology advances, society improves, and humanity matures into its eventual transformation into a higher state of being. The colorful medieval era was redefined as Dark Ages precisely because it preceded the new dawn of Reason now illuminating humanity in a complete inversion of the classical image of the Light of the World shining into the pagan darkness. Anno Domini became the Common Era. The future would be better than the past, in fact, it was certain to be better, because reason, once liberated, would solve all the problems that the superstition and ignorance of the past were unable to address. This faith in progress underwrote the Enlightenment’s confidence and justified its iconoclasm and its historical revisionism.

History would begin again from Year Zero. What point was there for Man to preserve what his future would forever leave behind?

These five premises, autonomous reason, sovereign individuality, mechanical nature, the fact-value distinction, and inevitable progress, are not incidental features of Enlightenment thought. They are its architecture, the load-bearing walls of its philosophy upon which everything else depends. And it is precisely these premises that the experience of the subsequent three centuries have systematically undermined.

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