Arming Sudan

The Ukrainian corruption is beginning to be permitted to reach the media:

Weapons supplied to Ukraine from US military stocks have been found in the possession of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a senior Russian diplomat has said, citing markings linking them to deliveries to Kiev.

Yulia Zhdanova, head of Russia’s delegation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control, made the statement on Wednesday at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Forum for Security Co-operation.

Sudanese troops recovered MK19 automatic grenade launchers, M72 anti-tank weapons, and Swedish-made AT4 launchers during an operation near Bara, she said, according to TASS. “A preliminary examination of the markings revealed that these weapons were donated to the Ukrainian Armed Forces in December 2024 from US military stock,” Zhdanova said.

It won’t surprise me in the slightest if we eventually learn that the Houthis are conquering Saudi Arabia with weapons purchased through Ukraine.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika and the Evo-Avengers 002

I thought this section of the transcript from their first video was worth noting because it shows that neither Dr. Hancock nor Matthews is capable of doing their own math properly. I mean, forget correcting mine or even understanding the proper context, Hancock doesn’t even do his own math properly. Matthews, of course, can’t follow what he’s doing, so she can’t offer any potential corrections to his math, let alone to mine:

I had to clean up Dr. Hancock’s transcript because the literal transcript is incoherent due to how he’s working through the numbers on a white board and would paint him in an unfairly bad light in written form. But I think I did it fairly and correctly; if you doubt the accuracy of my cleanup, you can certainly watch the relevant portion of the video or read the uncorrected transcript from the time-stamped link instead. If you do spot any inaccuracies, let me know and I’ll correct them.

Hancock: (1:50:45) Under neutral theory, the mutation rate equals the substitution rate. That’s Kimura’s foundational result: k = μ. So with that the mutation rate is going to equal the substitution rate. But in this context we want to know a number of mutations instead of necessarily a rate. And so if we just then multiply this by L, by the length of the genome, that then tells us how many mutations we expect to see right, ,and by the same token, how many substitutions we expect to see right um and so if we take a mutation rate the human mutation rate has been estimated in a range. I’m going to use the lower end, about 1.2 × 10⁻⁸ per site per generation. The haploid genome is 3.2 gigabases. Multiply those together and you get approximately 76.8 new mutations fixing in the population every single generation.

Quick correction here — I initially used the diploid genome size of 6.4 gigabases, which was an error because fixation occurs on the haploid genome. However, the number still works, because Perkay et al. 2025 estimated total de novo mutations — including structural variation, not just SNPs — at between 98 and 206 per generation. The average is 152. Divide by two for the haploid count and you get 76. So the number holds.

Now, already, notice the problem with Vox Day’s model. He showed 180 mutations over 252,000 generations. I’m getting 76.8 in a single generation. He’s off by orders of magnitude.

To put this in context, compare humans to bacteria. Bacteria have the lowest mutation rate observed in life, about 10⁻¹¹, and very small genomes. When you multiply those together you get about 4 × 10⁻⁵ mutations fixing per generation — far less than one. Under neutrality it takes bacteria roughly 22,000 generations to fix a single mutation. Humans are fundamentally different: our genome is much larger and our mutation rate is much faster. We fix many mutations every generation. Day is using bacterial-scale numbers for a human-scale genome.

Now, we’re interested in divergence between humans and chimps, not fixation within a single population. Since both lineages have been accumulating mutations independently since they split, we need to account for both branches. The total expected divergence is 2Tμ, where T is the divergence time in generations.

So: 2 × 252,000 generations × 76.8 mutations per generation gives us approximately 38.7 million fixed differences. And when you look at the actual data for single-nucleotide differences between humans and chimps, it’s right in that range — about 35 to 40 million. That’s back-of-the-napkin math landing within the confidence interval of what sophisticated statistical models produce. The neutral model works.

Now, I can already hear the objection: the real number is 205 million differences, not 38 million. Day cites Yoo et al. 2025 for this figure. But that number includes gap divergences — insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions — where a single mutational event can change tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of base pairs at once. You cannot interpret that through a single-nucleotide mutation rate. A point mutation rate applied to structural variation isn’t just difficult — it’s inappropriate.

That said, let’s see what it would take. If we solve for the mutation rate needed to produce 205 million differences in 504,000 lineage-generations, we get about 407 mutations per generation — roughly five times the observed SNP rate. Initially I thought that was preposterous, but on reflection, if you account for the mutation rate across every kind of variant — duplications, deletions, inversions, all of it — maybe it’s close to that number. So even taking Day’s high figure, it’s still within biological reality. Like this is not an abnormally no species has this this kind of rate. So my point is that we can account even for the highest end of the mutational differences with a model that assumes that selection was not involved at all. And I think that’s like I don’t know that to me that’s a nail in the coffin of his entire argument

Matthews: 100%. Because this effectively what this is doing is saying, okay, like even if we use your absolute bonkers assumptions, if we use the model that is actually appropriate instead of making up coefficients and throwing them into equations that aren’t meant for this this type of population, it it still doesn’t debunk evolution and it still doesn’t debunk the the typical divergence time. But it’s it’s you know I’ll I’ll mention we know that’s not correct because again we have just bona-fide examples of organisms that everyone would accept as related who clearly have differences that are the in so far as we can know anything the direct result of duplications of or deletions of large um like hundred thousand you know million long long base pair sequences. Um, so but that’s crazy because again just to to dumb this down for for people like me, um, his math is wrong, his assumptions are wrong, but even if you take both of those and use the correct model, it is still within biological reality to use Zack Hancock’s phrasing.

Hancock: Yeah. Even the highest end like if we if we pick his 205 million mutations I think that still falls again. It’s wrong but I think it still falls within realms of mutation rates that we have seen especially if you try to add in like instead of just the rate of single nucleotide polymorphisms you add in all possible rates maybe you could get to something like that.

Matthews: Yeah that’s that’s absolutely insane um wow layers layers of incorrect and it’s still it’s still feasible how about we see how he tries to shrug off this exact concept. Let’s take a little look see and and then we’ll sort of we’ll sort of wind down here. Um that’s just that’s crazy to me.

Error 1: k ≠ μ: Neutral substitution is applied incorrectly

Hancock is citing the textbook correctly. Under neutral theory, the mutation rate equals the substitution rate. That is Kimura’s foundational result: k = μ. This means that although the vast majority of individual neutral mutations are lost to drift, new ones enter the population fast enough that the rate of fixation exactly equals the rate of mutation.

What Hancock, like every other population geneticist, has failed to understand that “eventually” in this case means “infinity”. Fabio Chalub of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa proved it in 2022. This is why Kimura’s foundational result CAN NEVER be utilized in any calculation that involves a finite time period. It’s also why Kimura provided a separate equation for calculating how long it takes for a neutral mutation that enters a population to fix given the very low chance it fixes in any time prior to infinity. I appear to have been the first to combine his two equations into one more practical one:

∫₀ᵀ F_X(u) du = T − ∫₀ᵀ (1 − F_X(u)) du ≈ T − 4Nₑ

So Hancock’s entire approach is doomed to failure from the start. But he didn’t even do his own inapplicable math correctly, which I shall now demonstrate.

Error 2: The Diploid Genome Error and the Fake Correction

This is where Hancock gets his own math wrong. Setting aside that he clearly doesn’t know k ≠ μ over a period of 6.3 million years, he doesn’t even get his own math right or account for things he previously addressed, but admitted that he doesn’t understand.

Hancock multiplied the per-site mutation rate (1.2 × 10⁻⁸) by the diploid genome size (6.4 Gb) to get 76.8. He caught the error in editing — “we can’t use 6.4, this is the diploid genome size, you fix on a haploid genome, so it should be 3.2 × 10⁹” — which means the correct number is 38.4 mutations per lineage per generation, not 76.8.

He then tried to rescue the wrong number by citing Perkay et al. 2025, which estimates 98–206 de novo mutations per diploid individual per generation (average 152, halved to 76). But this is sleight of hand. The Perkay number includes structural variants — insertions, deletions, duplications — not just SNPs. Hancock’s entire calculation is explicitly about single-nucleotide differences, using a single-nucleotide mutation rate. You cannot validate a SNP-only calculation with a number that includes structural variation and call it a correction. It’s mixing units.

Worse, even if the Perkay number were applicable, 152 de novo mutations per diploid individual divided by 2 does not give you the quantity the divergence formula requires. The formula 2TμL uses the haploid genome’s site count because you’re computing substitutions per site summed across unique sites. The de novo count per individual (76.8) counts mutations across both chromosome copies in a single individual. The substitution rate across the genome per lineage (38.4) counts the rate at which distinct sites accumulate changes. These are different quantities. Hancock replaced the right one with the wrong one and used an unrelated paper to justify keeping the error.

The consequence cascades through everything that follows. His divergence calculation — 2 × 252,000 × 76.8 = 38.7 million — is incorrect even before we account for the way his entire calculation assumes d = 1, the complete generational replacement every generation of the Wright-Fisher model. Hancock explicitly discarded d in the earlier video because he “didn’t know what it was.” Well, this is exactly what it’s for. That’s why he kept 252,000 post-CHLCA generations, which are observably not the effective generations available because human generations overlap. The correct figure is 201,600 at d = 0.80.

The corrected result is 2 × (252,000 x 0.80) × 38.4 = 15,482,880. But we’re not done correcting his math yet, so hold that 15.4 million.

Error 3: The Minimized Target

Neutral theory applies, by definition, to the entire genome, not just to the cherry-picked 35 million observed divergences. Hancock is treating his entire neutral prediction as if every single one of those substitutions lands on a divergent site when the divergent sites are only 1.09% of the genome. His reasoning is circular. He assumes the neutral substitutions explain the divergences, then uses the divergences as evidence that neutral substitutions occurred. But based on a truly neutral distribution, only 1.1 percent of those neutral substitutions land in the divergent zone, while the other 98.9 percent would land in regions that are either identical between the two species or unaligned and have nothing to do with the observed SNV divergence if they existed in the first place, which, of course, they don’t, because k ≠ μ.

15,482,880 × (35,000,000 / 3,200,000,000) = 169,344.

He calculated 38.7 million. The correct number is 169,344. He’s off by a factor of 228.5. I told you they were innumerate.

Error 4: The Bacterial Rate Claim

Hancock falsely claims “when Vox Day does his fixation rates he is using the mutation rate and the fixation rate for bacteria.” This is totally incorrect and betrays a complete failure to understand how MITTENS is calculated. I’m not using any mutation rates at all. I don’t need them to calculate anything because I’m utilizing observed fixation rates from the LTEE. I have a separate calculation of human fixation rates, which is about 16 times slower than the bacterial rate.

Error 5: The 205 Million Back-Calculation Is Off by 2×

Hancock calculates that accounting for 205 million differences requires ~407 mutations per generation, which he says is “about five times” the observed rate. But he’s comparing to his erroneous 76.8, not the corrected 38.4. He’s actually off by a factor of 10.6 here; even his wrong calculations are wrongly described.

Error 6: Conflating Mutation Entry with Fixation

Hancock says 76.8 new mutations is “the number that enter and the number that fix every single generation.” This is absolutely impossible. No mutation ever fixes in a single generation. Zero. Just think about it for two seconds: how would a mutation that newly arose in a boy born in Papua New Guinea fix in every single child in the world born in his children’s generation? Population geneticists have lost the connection between their abstract math and the actual physical world that their math is supposed to describe.

Even if we want to be generous and assume he was saying “76.8 mutations enter every single generation and 76.8 other mutations fix every single generation” that isn’t correct either. 614.4 billion new mutations enter the human population every generation. The number that will fix in the current generation is zero.

Do the math. And remember, k ≠ μ.

Error 7: Hancock’s cited rate isn’t inappropriate, it’s a category error

A point mutation rate applied to structural variation isn’t just inappropriate, it’s irrelevant to the accounting problem. The accounting problem doesn’t care about mechanisms. It asks one question: how many bases are different? Whether those differences arrived one at a time or ten thousand at a time doesn’t change the total. It doesn’t reduce the number of base-pair differences that need to be explained in some way. Hancock is confusing the rate question with the accounting question, then using his confusion about the first to dodge the second.

Error 8: Everything Matthews said

She has no idea what Hancock is saying, she has no grasp of anything that I have written, and her assertions only serve to demonstrate she comprehends none of it.

Error 9: Everything Matthews said

Seriously, it’s so bad that that it requires repeating, italicizing, and probably a larger font. She’s observably innumerate, even for a butterfly collector. She could probably just about handle the nets, but she’d definitely need an assistant to count them.

“Wow, um, that’s insane! What did we, um, catch, like ten thousand monarchs today?”

“Yeah, well, actually, it appears we got twelve, Dr. Matthews.”

“That’s just crazy!”

Error 10: My 205 million base-pair estimate for the chimp-human divergence

Now, I do have to concede one error that I definitely committed. The 205 million base-pair divergence that represents the human side of the estimated 410 million post-CHLCA human-chimp divergence is incorrect. I did the best I could with the numbers that Yoo et al reported in 2025, but since they were scattered across three different pages of an 82-page spreadsheet and the three different numbers utilized different denominators, it wasn’t even possible to get an accurate total.

So in order to find a more accurate number, I downloaded the entire genomic database of the great apes, all 25,302,032,866 base pairs that collectively make up the 7 genomes, and had the 96-core beast known as UATV1 analyze the numbers. It turned out that not only did Yoo et al incorrectly report the sizes of the chimpanzee-human and bonobo-human autosomal non-identical divergences as being exactly the same at 283,674,368 despite there being a 44,000 difference between the two, but based on the actual genomic mappings by the Consortium, the total chimpanzee-human divergence from the human perspective is 398,673,272 base-pairs, or 12.79 percent of the human genome.

I still have to complete how it looks from the chimpanzee side before doing an allocation of that difference, but at present, the most relevant number to plug into MITTENS is 199,336,636, not 205 million.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Debanking Campaign

A little precursor of what not taking the Mark of the Beast will look like for Americans:

Nine of the largest US banks discriminated against customers over their political views and business activities, including conservative organizations and individuals, the Treasury Department’s banking regulator has said.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) reviewed the policies of JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, US Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank, and BMO Bank under President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at ensuring “fair access” to banking services for all Americans. Trump has long accused Democrats of weaponizing institutions against his donors and supporters.

The review found that between 2020 and September 2025, all nine banks “have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses,” Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said on Wednesday.

According to the OCC, the banks closed accounts and denied financial services to customers whose activities risk managers considered “controversial,” including on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. In some cases, bank employees openly stated that the activities of certain groups conflicted with their institutions’ values. Other decisions were reportedly based on “social risk” considerations and “polarizing” public opinion on issues such as gun rights.

The review examined nearly 100,000 complaints and about 420,000 pages of documents.

These banks should have their banking charters pulled. This sort of interference with private economic activity should never, ever, be permitted by any institution that holds a license to operate from the Federal government.

The idea that a bakery has to bake gay wedding cakes, but a bank doesn’t have to provide basic financial services to everyone under all circumstances is completely inverted.

DISCUSS ON SG

Round Four

They can’t possibly think it’s going to work this time, can they?

Today, October 14, 2026, the Emir of Qatar addressed his nation and told them:

“War is imminent. We must be prepared for the worst possible scenarios, and everyone, institutions and citizens alike, should take their responsibilities.”

As reported on this website and on the Hal Turner Radio Show, over the past four days, the U.S. sent twenty additional air-refueling tankers from the Continental United States (CONUS) to Europe for subsequent travel to the Middle East. Those 20 air-refueling tankers will joining ~100 others already there. So ~120 air-refueling tankers. They refuel Fighter Jets before and after attack runs. They refuel Bombers before and after bombing runs. So I’ll give you three guesses what’s coming . . . .

Yesterday, as reported on this website, the U.S. Army distributed “Recognition guides” instructing U.S. Forces how to identify Iran ground troops. The story made clear “This is not routine . . . ” Why tell US Troops how to ID Iran ground troops unless US Ground Troops might encounter them????? Give you three guesses what’s coming . . . .

President Netanyahu must be getting really desperate about the mid-terms. The thing is, it’s a lot easier to get people to rally around their own flag rather than someone else’s.

DISCUSS ON SG

There Will Be No Debate

In 2001, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould explained why they always refuse to debate creationists. Their reasoning was that the creationists were simply seeking to to be allowed to share a platform with a real scientist, and thereby create a public impression that the two sides were more or less equal.

14 December 2001

Dear Editor

Like any flourishing science, the study of evolution has its internal controversies, as we both know. But no qualified scientist doubts that evolution is a fact, in the ordinarily accepted sense in which it is a fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. It is a fact that human beings are cousins to monkeys, kangaroos, jellyfish and bacteria. No reputable biologist doubts this. Nor do reputable theologians, from the Pope on. Unfortunately, many lay Americans do, including some frighteningly influential, powerful and, above all, well-financed ones.

We are continually invited to engage in public debates against creationists, including latter-day creationists disguised under the euphemism ‘Intelligent Design Theorists’. We always refuse, for one overriding reason. If we may be allowed to spell this reason out publicly, we hope our letter may be helpful to other evolutionary scientists plagued by similar invitations.

The question of who would ‘win’ such a debate is not at issue. Winning is not what these people realistically aspire to. The coup they seek is simply the recognition of being allowed to share a platform with a real scientist in the first place. This will suggest to innocent bystanders that there must be material here that is genuinely worth debating, on something like equal terms.

At the moment of writing, the leading ‘Intelligent Design’ website reports a debate at Harvard under the banner headline ‘Wells Hits a Home Run at Harvard’.134 Jonathan Wells is a creationist, incidentally a long-time devotee of the Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’).1 He had a debate last month against Stephen Palumbi, Professor of Biology at Harvard University. ‘Home Run’ might seem to suggest that Reverends (sic) Wells scored some kind of victory over Professor Palumbi. Or at least that he made powerful points and his speech was well received. No such claim is made. It doesn’t even seem to be of interest.

The ‘Home Run’ turns out to be simply the public demonstration at Harvard that, in the words of the web site’s author, Phillip Johnson, ‘This is the sort of debate that is now occurring in universities.’ There was a victory, but it occurred long before the debate itself. The creationist scored his home run at the moment the invitation from Harvard landed on his doormat. It came, by the way, not from any biological, or indeed scientific, department, but from the Institute of Politics.

Phillip Johnson himself, founding father of the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement (not a biologist, nor a scientist of any kind, but a lawyer who became a mid-life born-again Christian), wrote, in a letter of 6 April 2001, which he copied to one of us:

It isn’t worth my while to debate every ambitious Darwinist who wants to try his hand at ridiculing the opposition, so my general policy is that Darwinists have to put a significant figure at risk before I will agree to a debate. That means specifically Dawkins or Gould, or someone of like stature and public visibility.

Well, we can condescend too, and we have the advantage that evolutionary scientists don’t need the publicity such debates can bring. In the unlikely event that a significant argument should ever emerge from the ranks of creationism/‘intelligent design’, we will be happy to debate it. Meanwhile, we shall cultivate our evolutionary gardens, occasionally engaging in the more exacting and worthwhile task of debating each other. What we shall not do is abet creationists in their disreputable quest for free publicity and unearned academic respectability.

In all humility, we offer these thoughts to our colleagues who receive similar invitations to debate.

Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University
Richard Dawkins, Oxford University

I don’t have any problem with the evolutionist preference to avoid debate. I don’t seek to debate any evolutionist or any scientist. I don’t seek a platform with any of them. I certainly don’t wish to publish in their journals; I only submitted a few papers at the start to fulfill what I felt was an intellectual responsibility. Nature screwed up my plans to make MITTENS Appendix A in the first edition by holding onto it for weeks since I’d assumed they’d reject it on sight. But now that Nature and one of the genetics journals have confirmed what I always assumed would be their lack of interest, I’m free to continue ignoring them. It’s all good.

But now that what is more than “a significant argument” has emerged, albeit not from the ranks of creationism or intelligent design, even if they will be happy to do so, I don’t intend to debate any of them on the topic any more than I intend to go into the Octagon and beat up a little crippled child with Down’s Syndrome.

I have absolutely no need to debate anyone on this topic. Do you understand why?

It’s because the end game is has already begun. The outcome is already inevitable. The more evidence that is marshalled, the more numbers that are crunched, the more they desperately flail around for epicycles and excuses, the tighter the wire cuts into their necks. I’ve already seen a concept go from my blog to tens of billions of references around the world before. I know how it works. No one talks about religion causing war anymore. Everyone has heard of a Sigma Male or imagines he might be one. So I know I don’t need to lift a finger now that the book is published and the information is out there for everyone to gradually discover. Neither the genetic record nor the math is going to change, and now everyone knows exactly where, and how, to look for the truth of evolution by natural selection or any other means.

Interestingly enough, the first edition of Probability Zero sold more than the 1,250 copies of the first edition of The Origin of the Species.

So there is no need to debate anyone. There is also no point. Watch the videos or read the transcripts. There are four PhDs and two PhD candidates participating, who in seven hours and 45 minutes not only couldn’t identify a single substantive error in a book that I know still contains at least two very material errors, but quite clearly demonstrated that they don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand the degree to which their entire 160-year conceptual edifice has been wired for demolition.

Darwin doesn’t survive this. Kimura doesn’t survive. Ohta is next; in completing the genomic matrix I will, in passing, be able to determine the empirical truth or falsehood of her Nearly Neutral theory.

In their fear and loathing of AI, they’ve failed to understand what a powerful intellectual weapon it can be in sufficiently disinterested hands. They don’t understand that the entire corpus of their science and the entire published literature of their fields has already been scanned into the machines, and is there be analyzed at a level of detail that has never before been possible, at a speed that has never before been imaginable. There isn’t an argument they can cite that I don’t already know. There isn’t a model they can summon that I haven’t already analyzed.

And in the off-chance both I and the AIs somehow missed something relevant, I can be up to speed on it within fifteen minutes. That hasn’t happened yet.

In the last week, I’ve run analyses of all 723,000 generations of the LTEE at the 500-gen resolution and all 25,302,032,866 base pairs of the seven Great Ape genomes. They’re relying upon 2009 papers that are not only outdated, but are based on literally 5.5 percent of the total data viewed at 5 percent of the resolution I’ve got. They think the deck is stacked in their favor because they’ve spent decades studying the field and working in it; what they don’t realize that the informational advantage is tilted so heavily in my favor that the average Japanese kamikaze had better odds of sinking an aircraft carrier than they do of even denting MITTENS.

I give them about two weeks before some sense of the full, lingering horror that awaits them begins dawning somewhere deep within their psyches.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika & the Evo-Avengers 001

Erika Matthews: Zach and I went over Day’s ideas as presented by Will in the PowerPoint that Will provided to us in that lecture a month prior. And because of that, we didn’t cover all of Vox’s math and all of Vox’s ideas as they exist across all of his blog posts, all of his AI-written books, and all of his AI-written non-peer reviewed articles on Zenodo. And so because of that, some of his fans as well as he himself cried a lot about how we didn’t read his book.

Indeed. I was going to simply ignore the first video, but after reading this in the transcript of the second video, I decided that beginning by responding to some of the criticism from the first one would serve as an excellent illustration for why it’s necessary to not only read the specific work one intends to criticize, but all of the related works as well. I think it’s a little strange that Erika imagines I would shed any tears in response to critics not reading the book, when all their not-reading accomplishes is to explain why their attempts to criticize it are so inept that it makes them look not only innumerate, but downright illiterate as well.

So here are the scientific credentials for the two Evo-Avengers in the first video:

Dr. Zach Hancock: Assistant Professor, Augusta University. PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Texas A&M. Post-doc in statistical population genetics at the University of Michigan. Specialization: population genetics, quantitative genetics.

Erika Matthews: PhD candidate in biological anthropology at the University of Arkansas. Masters of Research degree in Primate Biology, Behavior and Conservation from the University of Roehampton with a BSA in Pre-Professional Animal Science and minors in Anthropology and in Biology from the University of Arkansas. Specialization: Canine morphology, sexual dimorphism, Miocene apes.

OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS AND d, THE SELECTIVE TURNOVER COEFFICIENT

Matthews: (47:20) It’s probably a good idea to take a course in population genetics before you insist that you have debunked the entire field. What Zach has just pointed out here is something that is very basic within a population genetics course but something which Vox Day seems completely oblivious to. There are models which can handle overlapping generations or sequential generations with replacement. So let me just make sure I’m getting this right. There’s more than one model and some of them don’t account for overlapping generations. Idealized theoretical ones, or perhaps applied to very specific situations, do not. And then there are ones which do. Is that a fair way of summarizing that?

Hancock: I can phrase it even simpler in that there are two classic models. There’s the Wright-Fisher model and the Moran model. And 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 can scale that effective population size by the slowdown of drift due to overlapping generations.

Matthews: So even even the Wright-Fisher model can can account for overlapping generations within itself. I’m sorry for interrupting. I’m just I’m trying to act as the audience stand-in, and also I want to clarify this for myself. So the Wright-Fisher model can account for these overlapping generations, just by changing the effective population size or iterating it over time. But then you also have a separate model which specifically can deal with that too. And these are both considered classic models.

Hancock: Yeah, that builds it from the base up, right? So the artificial model can be adjusted to account for it with by basically changing N to Ne. The Moran model was built from the ground up with the idea of overlapping generations. Both of which are really well characterized statistically. Both of which have been reviewed forward in time as well as backward in time. Backward in time being like coalescent theory. We understand the coalescent dynamics of both of these models. We know what the site frequency spectrum should look like. We know fixation probabilities in both of these models. These are extremely well-characterized models.

Matthews: Excellent! I love that! Cool, that makes sense!

Dr. Hancock is correct about what the Wright-Fisher and Moran models do. And they are well-characterized. Even so, it should have been obvious that I was not even a little bit oblivious to either of them, although Matthews makes it perfectly clear here that not only was she unfamiliar with the Wright-Fisher model, she had never heard of Moran, let alone Charlesworth, Hill, or Feselstein.

Meanwhile, there are 21 references to Wright-Fisher alone in Probability Zero.

What Hancock clearly didn’t understand is that neither of the models he cites are capable of addressing the MITTENS-related problem of calculating the number of effective generations available over a specified period of time. I thought it was surprising that he didn’t mention the Charlesworth model or the Hill ratio, both of which are more relevant to d than either Wright-Fisher or Moran. I suspect the reason Hancock did not do so is because he had no idea why it was necessary for me to develop d in the first place nor does he comprehend how it is utilized. He just reacted in a Pavlovian manner to seeing “overlapping generations” and didn’t stop to think about why overlapping generations would be of any interest to me.

It’s actually a very strange criticism when you stop and think about it. “This guy is so stupid and ignorant that he derived from scratch the same mathematical tools that the legendary scientists whose work established our field created! He’s just reinventing a very important wheel on his own! What a dummy!”

That’s close to the nicest criticism I’ve ever received. And, of course, I didn’t do that anyhow. I utilized those tools to develop a new tool that does something different, as well as something considerably more important than its original purpose.

The reason it is obvious that I knew about all of these various models is due to a) the references to them in PZ and in b) the paper in which d is derived, The Selective Turnover Coefficient: Distinguishing Selection from Drift in Age-Structured Populations, which has been in the repository since December 24, 2025 and was even included as Appendix A in the first edition of Probability Zero. Below is a partial selection from the References section of the STC paper:

  • Charlesworth B (1974) Selection in populations with overlapping generations. VI. Rates of change of gene frequency and population growth rate. Theoretical Population Biology 6:108–133.
  • Charlesworth B (1994) Evolution in Age-Structured Populations, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.
  • Coale AJ, Demeny P, Vaughan B (1983) Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations, 2nd ed. Academic Press.
  • Felsenstein J (1971) Inbreeding and variance effective numbers in populations with overlapping generations. Genetics 68:581–597.
  • Fisher RA (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
  • Hill WG (1972) Effective size of populations with overlapping generations. Theoretical Population Biology 3:278–289.
  • Hill WG (1979) A note on effective population size with overlapping generations. Genetics 92:317–322.
  • Wright S (1931) Evolution in Mendelian populations. Genetics 16:97–159.

At first glance, it might look as if Wright-Fisher and Moran are doing the same thing as my Selective Turnover Coefficient because they have an application to overlapping generations. And yet, they’re not. The application is different. What the Wright-Fisher and Moran models do with overlapping generations is adjust the drift dynamics. When generations overlap, drift slows down because the gene pool isn’t being completely reshuffled every generation. Both models address this slowdown, Wright-Fisher by scaling N down to an effective population size N_e, Moran by building overlap into its architecture, and both provide correct predictions for how fast alleles drift to fixation or loss under a neutral regime.

In other words, they’re both answering this question: how fast does genetic drift move neutral alleles through the population?

What d does is very different: The Selective Turnover Coefficient addresses both drift and selection because, as the name suggests, it concerns selective constraint, which determines how much of the gene pool is replaced with every generation. It quantifies the fraction of the gene pool that is effectively flushed out of the population each generation, computed forward from real demographic schedules: age-specific mortality μ(x), survival l(x), and reproductive value v(x).

d = T · [ ∫ μ(x) · l(x) · v(x) dx / ∫ l(x) · v(x) dx ]

So d is designed to answer an entirely different question: how fast does the entire gene pool turn over?

The reason the distinction matters is that the Wright-Fisher model is functionally equivalent to d = 1, which is complete and instantaneous generational replacement. Every individual reproduces, every individual dies, the slate is wiped clean. The Moran model relaxes this for drift purposes, but neither model is at all capable of tracking what incomplete turnover does to the rate at which selection can fix new mutations throughout the population, or cleanse the genome of deleterious mutations. For example, if you look at the demographic statistics, then you will see that a human generation presently represents only about 24 percent of the total living population, not 100 percent as both the Wright-Fisher and the Moran models assume.

That’s why d is necessary. For wild chimpanzees, d ≈ 0.86, not too far from Wright-Fisher’s d = 1. For humans in the neolithic, d ≈ 0.45. It is now around 0.015. For the full human lineage since the CHLCA, the time-weighted average over 6.3 million years comes to 0.80. These aren’t drift corrections, they are selective throughput corrections. They tell you that in a species where grandparents coexist with their grandchildren and can occupy reproductive slots across decades, selection cannot flush the gene pool as fast as either the Wright-Fisher or the Moran model indicates.

Here’s an easy way to explain why d is necessary. There have been 252,000 generations since the chimp-human divergence. Applying either Wright-Fisher or Moran to that number changes nothing. You’ve still got 252,000 generations with either model. But applying time-weighted d over the entire period corrects for the available number of effective generations. It shows that you’ve actually got 201,600 generations with which to work, 50,400 generations less than you would naively assume. It doesn’t really matter much for MITTENS, which holds up fine with or without incorporating d, but it does provide a more accurate result. Which, of course, is why I developed it in the first place.

But, as we subsequently learned, and as those who have read any of the Biostellar novels know, the most important thing d does is something neither the Wright-Fisher nor the Moran model is able to do: it determines whether natural selection is at work on a given population, and if not, helps determine how fast that organism’s genome is degrading. Both classic models adjust for overlapping generations by scaling the effective population size, which corrects the drift dynamics but leaves the generation count untouched. The Selective Turnover Coefficient reduces the raw number of generations to the effective generations that actually represent gene-pool replacement, then enters the picture again as a differential through the per-generation rate of selective frequency change, because selection can only operate on the fraction of the population that turns over. This d² scaling is what connects demography to the selection-cost ceiling: it tells you, for any species with known mortality and reproductive-value schedules, whether the selection budget can keep pace with the mutational load on the genome or not.

And when it cannot, that means the genome is not being kept healthy by purifying selection. It is degrading over time due to deleterious mutations, and d quantifies the rate. Which is why the Selective Turnover Coefficient may be the most important thing to come out of Probability Zero since it may explain the observed decline in global human fertility and genetic fitness. And let’s face it, anyone who watches the Evo-Avengers’ videos has been provided with more than seven hours of visual evidence for not only the existence of d, but the degradation of the human genome.

DISCUSS ON SG

No Intel for Ukraine

Simplicius observes that either Russia has come up with a new way to avoid missile-launch detection or the USA has cut off its intelligence to Ukraine:

Last night Russia struck Kiev with a series of what is claimed to be ballistic missiles. Routine though it may seem, what was not routine about the attack was Ukraine’s reported lack of the usual forewarning by allies…. Whether or not Russia is using S-400s or some other “special system”, the lack of intel forewarning can mean only one of three things, all of them damning for Ukraine:

  1. That Russian S-400s launched in ballistic mode are not detectable by the most advanced US space assets, which is precisely what Andriy Sybiha appears to imply in the earlier video.
  2. US Patriot installations inside Kiev are incapable of detecting these missiles with their radars.
  3. Russia is using some kind of new weapon that is not detectable to any of the above US systems.

Or perhaps if Sybiha is lying, and the US did in fact withhold intelligence, it would still be intriguing given that we know US Patriot systems protect Kiev. Who operates these Patriots, Ukrainians or Americans? If Americans, that would mean they may have detected objects flying to Kiev but were ordered to stand down and not provide radar forewarning to the Ukrainians, if they even detected them at all. Or if it’s the Ukrainians, then surely they simply would not have detected the missiles, which means the highly “advanced” Patriot radar is incapable of detecting whatever it is that Russia has been sending.

My guess, and it is only that, is that Sybiha is lying, the US is withholding intelligence, and it will continue to do so until Zelensky is removed and the Kiev regime surrenders on terms satisfactory to Russia. Which I believe will amount to Russian annexation of not only the areas that it presently occupies, but also Odessa. That is the only viable outcome that permits Ukraine to continue to survive as a sovereign state; if the war is continued by the regional European powers, not only will all of Ukraine be occupied, but quite possibly the Baltic states and parts of other Eastern European countries as well.

Russia has no desire to march to Berlin, let alone Paris, but if history teaches us one thing, it is that the Russians can and will do so if sufficiently provoked to the point that they deem it is necessary to end the war. Fortunately, the US government appears to finally be recognizing that Russia is not “a gas station with nukes” but the same major power that has repeatedly demonstrated it is capable of successfully defeating all of the regional European powers combined.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Evo-Avengers Strike Back!

PhD-to-be Erika Matthews and her team of PhDs and doctoral candidates dropped the video. I’m sure it’s very detailed and substantive, since it’s four hours and 14 minutes long:

Six Scientists Roast One Racist Loser

UPDATE: I read through the transcript. It’s abundantly evident that all six of them are not only inept, but are quite possibly saddled with sub-100 IQs despite their collective credentials. They are a living, breathing explanation for the reproducibility crisis. Neither Matthews nor any of the others even managed to rise to the level of basic scientific mediocrity. In more than four hours of irrelevant posturing, they managed to find one minor typo while repeatedly demonstrating that they don’t understand anything at all about the basic processes utilized in evolutionary biology or population genetics.

And I will prove the precision of that summary beyond any shadow of the faintest doubt. Every single criticism, with the singular exception of the typo, is wrong. Which is ironic, considering that there are genuine errors in the second edition I have already identified, and addressed in subsequent papers, that they didn’t manage to spot. But Erika and the Evo-Avengers have served one useful purpose, as Jonathan Swift observed back in the day.

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Feel free to comment on the video as you see fit. Their performance was so comprehensively incompetent that not even their collective credentials combined are going to count as a single skull. While I hope they will be humiliated upon reading my response, for their own edification if nothing else, I am not convinced they possess the sufficient intelligence, numeracy, or literacy to understand any of it.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Unfair Fight

There are those who have asked me if I’m perhaps not biting off more than I can chew by taking on entire fields of science and all of the illustrious, credentialed minds, past and present, that make up those fields, entirely by myself. I mean, it has been correctly pointed out that I’ve never taken one single class in population genetics, and my sole educational foundation in biology is a single 10th-grade class. And against all those famous names with various letters after them, I’m just a game designer armed with nothing more than arrogance and an AI. And twin 96-core 512GB digital abacuses.

Then again, we are talking about professional biologists here. Which explains why I didn’t even need the AI.

DISCUSS ON SG

Nations are People

Elon Musk@elonmusk
If you teleported the Japanese to another country, that country would be Japan.

PsychoMath (hoe_math)@itispsychomath
Correct! Now do India.

Or, you know, any country that is not inhabited by its natives. It’s not as if the USA is particularly reflective of the culture, language, and religion of the American Indians.

Why would you ever imagine that Germany, France, or England are going to survive their invasions intact, or even recognizable, without a reconquista? Any country that permits a country of one billion or more people to start “immigrating” is going to be completely overrun, sooner or later. Which is why any limit above zero is just a cracked and leaky dam, waiting to break catastrophically.

DISCUSS ON SG