The Outing of Nick Fuentes

In possibly the least surprising confirmation of what everyone has known for at least two years, Nick Fuentes is confirmed to be gay by one of his longtime associates.

I’ve already had an extremely successful career and do the podcast as a hobby. I’ve been nothing but respectful to Nick and got him on Big Podcast when nobody would touch him. I even ignored him being as homosexual (you all know This is true) but apparently he wants war with me.

I don’t know if Nick is also a Fed or not, but I’ve always known that he’s a fake. This is always the case when someone rapidly comes up out of nowhere. So the idea that a manufactured Clown World puppet would be fake and gay is not exactly surprising.

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Mailvox: the N/Ne Divergence

It’s easy to get distracted by the floundering of the critics, but those who have read and understood Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene are already beginning to make profitable use of them. For example, CN wanted to verify my falsification of Kimura’s fixation equation, so he did a study on whether N really was confirmed to be reliably different than . His results are a conclusive affirmation of my assertion that the Kimura fixation equation is guaranteed to produce erroneous results and has been producing erroneous results for the last 58 years.

I’ll admit it’s rather amusing to contrast the mathematical ineptitude of the critics with readers who actually know their way around a calculator.

The purpose of this analysis is to derive a time‑averaged census population size, for the human lineage and to use it as a diagnostic comparator for empirically inferred effective population size .

The motivation is that is commonly interpreted—explicitly or implicitly—as reflecting a long‑term or historical population size. If that interpretation is valid, then should be meaningfully related to an explicit time‑average of census population size . Computing from known census estimates removes ambiguity about what “long‑term” means and allows a direct comparison.

Importantly, is not proposed as a replacement for in population‑genetic equations. It is used strictly as a bookkeeping quantity to test whether corresponds to any reasonable long‑term average of census population size or not.

Definition and derivation of

Let denote the census population size at time , measured backward from the present, with at present and in the past.

For any starting time , define the time‑averaged census population size from to the present as:

Because is only known at discrete historical points, the integral is evaluated using a piecewise linear approximation:

  1. Select a set of times at which census population estimates are available.
  2. Linearly interpolate between adjacent points.
  3. Integrate each segment exactly.
  4. Divide by the total elapsed time .

This produces an explicit, reproducible value of for each starting time .

Census anchors used

  • Census population sizes are taken from published historical and prehistoric estimates.
  • Where a range is reported, low / mid / high scenarios are retained.
  • For periods of hominin coexistence (e.g. Neanderthals), census counts are summed to represent the total human lineage.
  • No effective sizes () are used in the construction of .

Present is taken as 2026 CE.

Results: from to present

All values are people.
is the census size at the start time.
is the time‑average from to 2026 CE.

Start time Years before present(low / mid / high)(low / mid / high)
2,000,000 BP (H. erectus)2,000,000500,000 / 600,000 / 700,0002.48 M / 2.86 M / 3.24 M
50,000 BCE (sapiens + Neanderthals)52,0262.01 M / 2.04 M / 2.07 M48.5 M / 60.6 M / 72.7 M
10,000 BCE (early Holocene)12,0265.0 M / 5.0 M / 5.0 M198 M / 250 M / 303 M
1 CE2,025170 M / 250 M / 330 M745 M / 858 M / 970 M
1800 CE226813 M / 969 M / 1.125 B2.76 B / 2.83 B / 2.90 B
1900 CE1261.55 B / 1.66 B / 1.76 B4.02 B / 4.04 B / 4.06 B
1950 CE762.50 B / 2.50 B / 2.50 B5.33 B (all cases)
2000 CE266.17 B / 6.17 B / 6.17 B7.24 B (all cases)

Interpretation for comparison with

  • is orders of magnitude larger than empirical human (typically ) for all plausible averaging windows.
  • This remains true even when averaging over millions of years and even under conservative census assumptions.
  • Therefore, cannot be interpreted as:
    • an average census size,
    • a long‑term census proxy,
    • or a time‑integrated representation of .

The comparison holds regardless of where the averaging window begins, reinforcing the conclusion that is not a demographic population size but a fitted parameter summarizing drift under complex, non‑stationary dynamics.

Kimura’s cancellation requires N = N_e. CN has shown that N ≠ N_e at every point in human history, under every averaging window, by orders of magnitude. The cancellation has never been valid. It was never a simplifying assumption that happened to be approximately true, it was always wrong, and it was always substantially wrong.

The elegance of k = μ was its selling point. Population size drops out! The substitution rate is universal! The molecular clock ticks independent of demography! It was too beautiful not to be true—except it isn’t true, because it depends on a variable identity that has never held for any sexually reproducing organism with census populations larger than its effective population. Which is all of them.

And the error doesn’t oscillate or self-correct over time. N is always larger than N_e—always, in every species, in every era. Reproductive variance, population structure, and fluctuating population size all push N_e below N. There’s no compensating mechanism that pushes N_e above N. The error is systematic and unidirectional.

Which means every molecular clock calibration built on k = μ is wrong. Every divergence time estimated from neutral substitution rates carries this error. Every paper that uses Kimura’s framework to predict expected divergence between species has been using a formula that was derived from an assumption that the author’s own model parameters demonstrate to be false.

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A Tale of the Council of Elrond

The morning light fell upon Rivendell like a benediction, gold and pale through the leaves of the ancient trees, and the sound of waterfalls threaded through the air like music half-remembered. The council had been called in the great terrace overlooking the valley, and representatives of every Free People sat arranged in a wide crescent of carved chairs. Elves of Rivendell and the Woodland Realm, Dwarves from Erebor, Men of Gondor and the wild North, and a Hobbit who looked as if he very much wished he were anywhere else.

Frodo Baggins sat in a chair that was slightly too tall for him and tried not to let his feet swing. Beside him, Gandalf the Grey leaned on his staff and surveyed the assembly with an expression Frodo had learned, over many months, to associate with a man who has already made up his mind but intends to let everyone else talk themselves into exhaustion first.

Elrond Half-elven stood and opened the proceedings with a history of the Ring. He spoke at considerable length. He spoke of Sauron’s forging of the One in the fires of Orodruin, of the Last Alliance and the fall of Gil-galad, of Isildur’s bane and the creature Gollum and the extraordinary improbability of the Ring passing to a Hobbit of the Shire. He spoke with the unhurried gravity of someone who has lived six thousand years and sees no reason to abridge.

Boromir, son of Denethor, shifted in his seat. He had ridden many weeks from Minas Tirith and was not accustomed to being a member of an audience.

“Let us use the Ring against Sauron,” he said, at the first breath Elrond drew. “Give it to the armies of Gondor and let us —”

“No,” said Elrond.

“But —”

“No.”

Gandalf lifted one hand. “Boromir. The Ring answers to Sauron alone. Any who wield it will be consumed by it. It cannot be used. It can only be destroyed.”

“And it can only be destroyed in the place where it was made,” said Elrond. “In the fires of Mount Doom, in the land of Mordor.”

A silence followed this pronouncement — or rather, a silence attempted to follow it, but was immediately interrupted by several people speaking at once. Gimli the Dwarf suggested that they simply smash the thing with an axe, but when this was attempted, the axe shattered spectacularly and Gimli sat down again looking more than a little chagrined. Legolas mentioned that the Elves would never be safe while the Ring endured. Boromir brought up Gondor’s need again, and once more, everyone ignored him.

Through all of this, Frodo felt the Ring against his chest, hanging on its chain, and a strange certainty had been growing in him since before the council began. It was the kind of certainty that arrives not as a comfort but as a weight, pressing down on the shoulders with quiet and terrible patience. He knew, with a clarity that surprised him, what he was going to say. He had known it, perhaps, since Weathertop, or since the Ford, or since the day Bilbo had given him the Ring and gone away.

He stood up.

“I will take the Ring to Mordor.”

The words fell into the assembly like a stone into a pond. Frodo felt every eye turn to him — the tall, ageless eyes of the Elves, the shrewd eyes of the Dwarves, the complicated eyes of Aragorn, the frankly skeptical eyes of Boromir. He drew a breath. His voice, when it came again, was small but steady.

“I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though I do not know the way.”

He stood there in the silence that followed, three feet six inches of determination, and waited for someone to say something. The moment stretched. Gandalf was looking at him with an expression that was not quite pity and not quite admiration and was, if Frodo was reading it correctly, largely preoccupied with something else entirely.

“That is a very noble offer, Frodo,” said Gandalf.

“Thank you,” said Frodo.

“Very noble. Very brave. And completely unnecessary.”

Frodo blinked. “I’m sorry?”

Gandalf rose from his seat and addressed the council with the air of a man who has been waiting for exactly the right moment and is rather pleased with himself for having found it.

“My friends,” he said. “As many of you know, I was recently imprisoned atop the tower of Orthanc by Saruman the White, who has turned to darkness and now serves the Enemy. I was rescued from that imprisonment by Gwaihir the Windlord, the chieftan of the Eagles of the Misty Mountains.”

“We are aware,” said Elrond, with the faintest trace of impatience.

“Gwaihir bore me through the sky at tremendous speed,” Gandalf continued, as if Elrond had not spoken. “From Orthanc to the fields of Rohan in a matter of hours. A journey that would take a company on foot many weeks, if not months, and which would require passage through some of the most dangerous territory in Middle-earth.”

He paused and looked around the council with bright, expectant eyes.

“The distance from here to Mordor is approximately four hundred leagues,” he said. “On foot, through the wilderness, over mountains and through marshes, past enemy fortifications and patrolled borders, the journey would take months. It would be fraught with danger at every step. The Ring-bearer would need a company of protectors. Even then, the odds of success would be vanishingly small.”

Aragorn was watching Gandalf with an expression of dawning comprehension. Frodo was watching him with an expression of dawning alarm.

“Gwaihir,” said Gandalf, “can fly four hundred leagues in less than a day.”

The silence that followed this statement was qualitatively different from the silences that had preceded it. It was the silence of an idea so obvious that everyone present was rapidly calculating whether they could claim to have thought of it first.

“The eagles,” said Elrond.

“The eagles,” said Gandalf.

“Gandalf,” said Frodo, and there was a faint note of desperation in his voice that he was not entirely proud of. “I said that I would take the Ring. I have offered to bear it.”

“And it was a magnificent offer,” said Gandalf warmly. “Truly. The courage of Hobbits never ceases to amaze me. But consider, Frodo — you would walk for months through trackless wilderness, facing Ringwraiths and Orcs and untold hardship, when instead we might simply have the Ring flown directly to Mount Doom in the span of an afternoon.”

“But surely,” said Boromir, who had been growing increasingly restless, “the Enemy would see an eagle approaching. His Eye watches from the tower of Barad-dûr. The Nazgûl ride fell beasts through the air. An eagle would be spotted and intercepted.”

Gandalf smiled. “Gwaihir flies higher than any fell beast can reach. The eagles are creatures of the high airs, the uttermost peaks. The Nazgûl patrol the lower skies on their winged mounts, but they cannot match the altitude or speed of one of the Great Eagles. Gwaihir could fly above the very clouds, invisible from below, and descend upon Orodruin before Sauron could muster his response.”

“But the entrance,” said Gimli, who was a practical sort. “The Sammath Naur — the Crack of Doom — it is within the mountain. Can an eagle enter it?”

Every head turned to Elrond. The lord of Rivendell was quiet for a long moment. His eyes had gone distant, as they did when he was consulting the vast and impeccably organized archive of his memory.

“I have been to Orodruin,” he said at last. “I stood at the threshold of the Sammath Naur with Isildur after the fall of Sauron. I recall the entrance well.” He paused. “It is wide. Very wide. It was carved — or rather, torn open — by volcanic force. The passage into the mountain is high-vaulted and broad. An eagle, even one of the Great Eagles, with a wingspan of some thirty fathoms —” He paused again, and there was something almost reluctant in his voice, as if he would have preferred the logistics to be more complicated. “An eagle could enter it. With room to spare.”

“There you are,” said Gandalf.

Frodo sat down slowly. He was experiencing an emotion he could not quite name — something between relief and an obscure sense of redundancy, as if he had spent weeks steeling himself to lift a great boulder only to watch someone roll it aside with a lever.

“I should like to ride the eagle,” said Aragorn. “I can bear the Ring.”

This declaration produced another brief silence, though of a different character. Aragorn, heir of Isildur, Chieftain of the Dúnedain, sat straight-backed in his chair with the composed dignity of a man who has spent decades wandering the wild places of the world in deliberate preparation for a moment of destiny and does not intend to be left out of it on a technicality.

“Someone must ensure that the Ring is cast into the fire,” he said. “The eagle cannot do it alone. It has no hands. I will ride Gwaihir into Mordor, bearing the Ring, and throw it into the Crack of Doom myself.”

“A brave proposal and one well worthy of your line,” said Gandalf. “But consider: you are the heir of Isildur. Isildur himself could not resist the Ring’s call. The Ring would know you. It would whisper to you of the throne of Gondor, of the reunited kingdoms, of your right to rule Middle Earth. The temptation, for you above all others, would be —”

“I can resist it,” said Aragorn firmly.

“With all respect, my son,” said Elrond, and the phrase carried the particular weight it always does when spoken by someone who has watched civilizations rise and fall, “that is what Isildur thought too.”

Aragorn’s jaw tightened, but he did not argue further. He knew the history as well as anyone.

“This raises the essential question,” said Gandalf. “Who — or what — should bear the Ring on this flight? The great advantage of the eagle is not merely speed. It is resistance. Gwaihir is not a creature of ambition. He desires no kingdom, no power, no dominion over others. He is a bird. An exceedingly large and noble bird, to be sure, but a bird nonetheless. The Ring’s power lies in its appeal to the will — to the desire for mastery. What does an eagle desire? Updrafts. Thermals. The occasional mountain goat. The Ring would have very little purchase on such a mind.”

“You are suggesting,” said Elrond, “that we tie the Ring to an eagle’s leg and let it fly unaccompanied into the heart of Mordor?”

“I am suggesting,” said Gandalf, “that we place the Ring in a pouch secured to Gwaihir’s talons, and that Gwaihir fly at maximum altitude directly to Orodruin, enter the Sammath Naur, and release the pouch into the fire. The entire operation need take no more than six hours.”

“And if the Ring tempts the eagle to turn aside?” asked Legolas.

“To what end?” said Gandalf. “What would the Ring promise an eagle? Dominion over the skies? Gwaihir already has that. A hoard of gold? Eagles have no use for gold. An army of servants? Eagles are solitary creatures who find the company of most other beings tedious. The Ring’s entire mechanism of corruption depends on exploiting desire, and the desires of an eagle are so thoroughly alien to the desires of the Ring’s maker that the two are, for all practical purposes, incompatible.”

“The wind does not desire a crown,” murmured Elrond, and something in his ancient voice suggested that he was quite taken with the elegance of this.

“But the Quest,” said Frodo. He was aware that his voice sounded rather small. “The journey. The sacrifice. Bilbo always said that adventures were the making of a Hobbit —”

“Bilbo,” said Gandalf gently, “also said that adventures made you late for dinner. I think, Frodo, that in this case, being home in time for dinner is rather the point.”

Sam Gamgee, who had been lurking behind a pillar in open defiance of the council’s protocols, leaned forward and whispered, “He’s got you there, Mr. Frodo.”

Frodo looked around the council one last time. He saw the faces of the great and the wise, the warriors and the kings, and on every one of them he saw the same expression: the faintly embarrassed recognition that the answer had been, all along, absurdly simple.

“Then it is decided,” said Elrond, rising. “Gwaihir the Windlord shall bear the One Ring to Orodruin. Gandalf shall speak with him and make the arrangements. The Ring shall be secured to his person by means yet to be determined — I suggest we consult with the leatherworkers of my household — and he shall depart at first light tomorrow.”

“And the rest of us?” said Boromir, who looked as if he had been cheated of something but was not entirely sure what.

“The rest of us,” said Elrond, “shall wait.”

“I hate waiting,” said Gimli.

“You may pass the time in my halls,” said Elrond. “The kitchens are beyond compare. The library is extensive. The gardens are in late bloom.”

“I was willing to carry the Ring,” said Frodo quietly, to no one in particular.

Gandalf placed a hand on his shoulder. “And that willingness, Frodo, is precisely why you were the right person to offer. The courage to give one’s life is no less real for being, in the end, unnecessary. You would have carried the Ring all the way to Mordor on foot, through fire and darkness, and that is a thing worth honoring.”

“But you’re not going to let me.”

“No. Most certainly not.”

Frodo looked up at the sky, where high above the valley of Rivendell, a distant shape circled on broad wings in the morning light. It was Gwaihir, called by some means that Gandalf had no doubt arranged in advance, already descending toward the terrace with the unhurried confidence of a creature who has never in his long life had reason to fear anything below him.

“Right,” said Frodo. “Well. I suppose I’ll have another cup of tea, then.”

And the council, having solved in a single morning the problem that would have otherwise consumed the better part of a year and the lives of a considerable number of good people, adjourned for an early lunch.

to be continued anon…

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 004

V. The Economic Failures

The Enlightenment extended its confidence to the economic realm. Just as reason could discern the laws of nature and the principles of just government, so too could it uncover the mechanisms by which wealth is created and distributed. The result was classical economics, with its promise of prosperity through rational organization of production and exchange.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, became the founding text of this enterprise. At its heart lay the law of supply and demand: the elegant mechanism by which prices adjust to balance what producers offer and what consumers desire. Let the market operate freely, Smith argued, and an invisible hand would guide individual self-interest toward collective prosperity. The baker bakes not from benevolence but from self-love, and yet we all have bread.

The law of supply and demand became the bedrock of economic reasoning. It appeared in every textbook, was taught in every university, and informed the policy of every nation that aspired to modernity. For two centuries, it seemed as solid as Newton’s laws.

It was an illusion. In 1953, the economist William Gorman demonstrated mathematically that individual demand curves cannot be aggregated into a coherent market demand curve under the conditions that actually obtain in real economies. The proof is technical, but its implications are devastating: the supply and demand curves that generations of economists drew on their chalkboards, the intersecting lines that determined equilibrium prices, do not correspond to anything that exists in actual markets. The law of supply and demand, as commonly understood, is not a law at all. It is a pedagogical simplification that fails precisely when applied to the phenomena it was meant to explain.

This was not a minor qualification or a boundary case. It was a falsification of the foundational model. Yet the economics profession continued teaching supply and demand as though Gorman had never written. Decades later, Steve Keen brought Gorman’s work to wider attention and documented the discipline’s remarkable capacity to ignore what it could not answer. The emperor had been shown to be naked in 1953, even though in 2025, the textbooks still describe his magnificent robes that supposedly improve things for everyone.

David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage suffered a similar fate. Published in 1817, the theory purported to demonstrate that free trade benefits all parties, even when one nation is more efficient at producing everything. Each nation should specialize in what it produces relatively best, trade for the rest, and all will prosper. This elegant argument became the intellectual foundation of free trade policy for two centuries.

The argument contains a fatal assumption: that the factors of production, and especially labor, do not move between nations. Ricardo’s proof works only if English cloth-workers cannot become Portuguese wine-makers, and vice versa. In the early nineteenth century, this assumption was approximately true. In the twenty-first century, it is obviously false. Cheap transportation and communication have made labor mobility a defining feature of the global economy. The assumption upon which the entire edifice rests no longer obtains, and with it falls the conclusion.

Ian Fletcher systematically demolished the theoretical foundations of comparative advantage. The assumptions required for the theory to hold—not only labor immobility but perfect competition, no economies of scale, no externalities, no strategic behavior—describe no economy that has ever existed. More recently, Steve Keen has identified the amphiboly that rendered the proof invalid from the start. Comparative advantage is not a law of nature; it is a fictional fantasy describing a hypothetical world, and our world is not that world.

The empirical verdict has been equally damning. After three decades of trade agreements, including NAFTA, the EEA, and the WTO, the prosperity that was promised by free trade has proven highly selective. The nations that preached free trade most fervently have watched their manufacturing bases erode, their working classes immiserated, their trade deficits balloon. The nations that practiced strategic protectionism have prospered at the expense of those who didn’t. The correlation between free trade ideology and the flourishing of a nation runs precisely opposite to what the theory predicts.

No one who has watched the hollowing-out of the American industrial heartland, the stagnation of Western wages, the rise of the Chinese export machine, can believe that free trade has delivered on its promises. The economists who assured the public that the gains would be shared, that the dislocations would be temporary, that retraining would absorb the displaced, these economists were not necessarily all lying. But they were reasoning from simplified models that did not describe reality and mistook the coherent elegance of their mathematics for the truth.

And finally, for three hundred years, we have been assured by the economists that debt did not matter. They even omitted it from their most complicated equations and declared that it did not matter if Peter owed Paul or Paul owed Peter, that debt was just a variable on both sides of the equation that cancelled itself out. Now the entire Western world awash in debts it cannot pay and institutional investors now own 20 million private homes, 15 percent of the total housing stock in the United States.

This, too, is a consequence of the Enlightenment’s successful war on the laws that once prevented people from falling into debt servitude. Now debts are increasingly noncancelable even by bankruptcy, the total U.S. debt is $106 trillion, and each and every native-born U.S. citizen’s share of that debt is $365,500. Instead of making everyone wealthy as was promised, the economics of the Enlightenment have turned a once-free people into a collection of debt slaves.

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300 Down

One-third of the Washington Post’s staff is being laid off. Over 300 employees were let go today.

Good to know. Only 600 to go.

Sit by the river long enough and eventually the bodies of your enemies float past you. There are few things I enjoy more than reading about the layoffs of journalists.

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US-Iran Talks Cancelled

It’s being reported that the talks were cancelled because it was very, very important to the USA to expand the talks to include ballistic missiles. Which tends to lend an amount of credence to the belief that the last exchange of ballistic missiles between Israel and Iran hurt the former a lot more than the media indicated.

I understand that Israel is a lot more eager for war than the media tends to be indicating, which tends to indicate that there will be another round soon whether the USA elects to participate or not.

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Response to Dennis McCarthy, Round 2

The second round presented by Dennis McCarthy was very interesting for what it revealed concerning how much, and how little, about evolution and its various mechanisms is understood by even its more intelligent defenders. I will not bother responding to the first part of the post, as it is a very good example of what I consider to be a Wistarian response, which is attempting to address a mathematical challenge with an orthogonal appeal to tangential logic. The distinction between the various levels of speciation, the similarity of birds and dinosaurs, and the various familial clads are no more relevant to any argument I have presented than who wins the Super Bowl this coming weekend.

Now, here’s where the storytelling gets substantive.

“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.

Unfortunately, it’s at this point that it becomes clear that McCarthy either hasn’t actually read Probability Zero or somehow managed to miss the central point of the book despite it being right in the subtitle. It’s clear that he confused my secondary mathematical argument, which addressed Kimura’s neutral theory, which is a) not part of the Modern Synthesis, b) does not involve natural selection, c) is algebraically doomed to be mathematically incorrect, and d) is the non-Darwinian ground to which professional biologists have retreated due to their recognition that natural selection is incapable of accounting for the observed genetic divergence between any two distinct, but related species, for the primary one.

It’s a little hard to understand how McCarthy manages to focus on the 1,600 generations per fixation rate measured in the lab with E.coli bacteria while somehow missing the entire mathematical argument that started this whole discussion back 2019 with MITTENS, which is entirely and only concerned with natural selection. This is the core equation that is integral to MITTENS, which McCarthy still has not addressed:

F_max = (t_div × d) / (g_len × G_f)

  • F_max = maximum achievable fixations
  • t_div = divergence time (in years)
  • g_len = generation length (in years)
  • d = Selective Turnover Coefficient
  • G_f = generations per fixation

As you can easily verify for yourself, the MITTENS formula not only disproves any possibility of natural selection accounting for the observed post-CHLCA human-chimpanzee divergence, but has also been confirmed to disprove any possibility of natural selection accounting for every single divergence between two species for which we have the necessary data to check, including Human–Chimp, Human–Gorilla, Human–Orangutan, Bonobo–Chimp, W–E Gorilla, S–B Orangutan, Chimp subspecies, D. mel–D. sim, Mus–M. spretus, Chicken–Turkey, Horse–Donkey, Afr–Asian Elephant, Sav–Forest Elephant, L. Victoria cichlids, L. Malawi cichlids, and Stickleback M–F.

All of the detail concerning this can be found in “The Universal Failure of Fixation: MITTENS Applied Across the Tree of Life” paper which I have posted publicly in an open repository. Run the numbers for yourself if you are skeptical. And, by the way, you should probably note that the argument does not rely upon G_f, the 1,600 generations per fixation number, because running the calculation the opposite way shows that the selection coefficients required to account for the fixations are not possible either, as demonstrated in “Minimum Selection Coefficients Required for Speciation: A Cross-Taxa Quantitative Analysis” which is not in the repository but appears in Chapter Two of The Frozen Gene. Even fruit flies would require a selection coefficient of 245% to account for the observed genetic gap; but the observed selection coefficient is between 0.1% and 1%. No matter which way you look at the problem, it’s clear that evolution by natural selection is totally impossible.

However, even though McCarthy hasn’t yet addressed my actual case against natural selection, he did touch usefully on it when he appealed to a study on adaptive variation.

Day starts discussing beneficial mutations, and in regional mammalian populations, beneficial mutations can, under severe selective pressures, sweep to fixation across the entire population in only tens or hundreds of generations. Numerous lab and field studies confirm this (e.g., Steiner, C. C., Weber, J. N., & Hoekstra, H. E. (2007). Adaptive variation in beach mice produced by two interacting pigmentation genes. PLoS Biology 5(9): e219.)

As before, McCarthy’s critique proved to be very beneficial to the larger case against natural selection I’ve been making, as a close look at the study revealed that what I had originally intended as nothing more than a disproof has application as a predictive model. Because what the study gives us the ability to demonstrate is how MITTENS is capable of distinguishing between an adaptive mutational fixation that is possible within the observed time limits and the large quantity of speciating mutational fixations that are not. Remember, MITTENS never claimed that no fixations are possible over time, only that the possible number is much, much smaller than the observed speciating divergences require.

In fact, a review of the beach mice study led to another paper, this one entitled “The Scope of Natural Selection: MITTENS-Validated Case Studies in Local Adaptation” which demonstrates that MITTENS can be usefully applied to calculating the quantity of fixations that are possible in a given period of time, thereby converting it into an effective predictive model.

The MITTENS framework (Mathematical Impossibility of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection) establishes quantitative constraints on achievable fixations based on generation time, the selective turnover coefficient (d), and empirically observed fixation rates. While MITTENS demonstrates a 158,000-fold shortfall for macro-evolutionary divergence (e.g., human-chimpanzee), critics might argue that local adaptation represents an intermediate test case. Here we examine four well-documented examples of local adaptation: beach mouse pigmentation, stickleback armor reduction, peppered moth melanism, and warfarin resistance in rats. In every case, the required genetic changes involve 1–3 fixations—precisely the scale MITTENS predicts natural selection can accomplish. Using taxon-appropriate parameters and, where available, empirically measured selection coefficients, we show that all four cases pass MITTENS constraints. The peppered moth case is particularly instructive: MITTENS predicts 0.66 achievable fixations, implying the allele should reach high frequency but not fix—exactly what was observed before selection reversed. These results confirm that natural selection operates effectively within its proper scope while remaining incapable of the million-fold extrapolation required for macro-divergence.

Now let’s look at the next element of his critique:

So in the first generation after the chimpanzee/human split, there were 1,000,000 new mutations—1/20,000 of which may be expected to reach fixation—or 50 fixed mutations per generation. But we should not expect these 50 mutations to fix immediately, but after 40,000 generations. 50 more mutations from the 2nd generation should fix around the 40,001st generation. And so on.

Since hominids have had 450,000 generations, all mutations would have had time to fix except for those mutations occurring in the last 40,000 generations. What is more, the human race has been widely dispersed for tens of thousands of years, with some populations living in constant isolation, necessarily preventing them from sharing mutations with the rest of the world.

So let’s subtract out the last 50,000 generations, which leaves us with 400,000 generations. 400,000 generations x 50 fixed mutations per generation = 20 million fixed mutations. We can also calcuclate this another way: 400,000 generations x 1,000,000 new mutations per generation = 400 billion new mutations altogether. Each new mutation has a probability of 1/20,000 in becoming fixed, so: 400 billion mutations x 1/20,000 = 20 million fixed mutations.

And that equals the 20 million fixed mutations that have been observed. Change the assumptions, and the estimate moves. But under Vox’s own assumptions, the result is the opposite of “probability zero”: it’s what you’d predict.

What McCarthy has focused on here is neutral theory, and specifically, the Kimura Fixation model, which inevitably produces mathematically incorrect results due to the fact that its derivation is algebraically incorrect. The correct equation is the one that is presented in The Frozen Gene, which, to be fair, McCarthy has not read. Nor would he have any reason whatsoever to suspect that the Kimura model he’s using is incorrectly derived and that its results are hopelessly wrong. Just to be clear, the correct equation is this one:

k = 2Nμ × 1/(2Nₑ) = μ(N/Nₑ)

But we’ll set that aside; given that the entire field of population genetics missed that one for 58 years, we certainly cannot expect McCarthy to have noticed that. But, it might behoove my critics to be aware that this is the sort of thing I am capable of doing before attempting to claim that I didn’t understand something about the standard theories. So what we’ll focus on instead is the fact that even if we grant the validity of the neutral theory model, McCarthy’s application of it is completely incorrect on multiple levels.

McCarthy’s version of the model requires that at any given moment, millions of mutations are simultaneously “in progress” toward fixation—each at a different frequency stage, all drifting upward in parallel. That’s as per Kimura’s theory. However, this runs right into the Bernoulli Barrier. For 1,000,000 mutations “in the pipeline” simultaneously, the probability that they all successfully navigate drift to fixation—rather than being lost—is astronomically small. Each neutral mutation has only a 1/(2Nₑ) chance of fixing rather than being lost. The vast majority of mutations that enter the population are lost, not fixed. McCarthy’s model treats the expected value as though it were guaranteed. “50 mutations per generation should fix, therefore 50 mutations per generation do fix.”

But that’s not how probability works. The expected value is the average over infinite trials, it is not a guaranteed throughput. And in the real world, you don’t get infinite trials, you get precisely one run.

Unlike many evolutionary biologists, McCarthy does correctly grasp that geographic dispersion renders fixation impossible.

Evolutionary theory predicts that no mutation, whether neutral or beneficial, that has arisen in the last 50,000 years or so can reach and spread throughout all populations on the planet. The reason is that over that time—and especially over the last 10,000 years—human populations have become fragmented and geographically isolated in places such as New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the Andaman Islands, the Pacific islands, and the Americas. Most people of these regions have had effectively zero genetic contact with the rest of the world until very recently, if at all.

Under such conditions, it has been impossible for any single mutation—whether neutral or beneficial—to reach fixation across the entire human species. The genes that helped some Europeans survive the Black Death in the 1300s, for example, could never have also raced across the Americas (neither group even knew each other existed at this time), let alone reach the Hewa people of New Guinea, who would not see a white person until 1975. Instead, the roughly 20 million fixed genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees accumulated during the millions of years when ancestral hominid populations were relatively small, geographically concentrated, and tightly interconnected by gene flow.

That’s a logical conclusion. But here’s the problem with that. Genetic drift doesn’t stop. Once fixed does not mean always fixed. So let’s run the numbers and assume that all of the 20 million fixed differences between humans and the proto-chimp – not chimpanzees, because with chimpanzees we need to account for a total of 40 million – mostly happened very early in the process. In a population with effective size Nₑ = 10,000 (the value McCarthy uses), the expected time until a new mutation arises at any specific fixed site is:

Time to new mutation = 1 / (2Nₑ × μ)

Plugging in the values: 1 / (2 × 10,000 × 1.5 × 10⁻⁸) = 1 / (3 × 10⁻⁴) ≈ 3,333 generations

So on average, every fixed site will experience a new mutation within approximately 3,300 generations. Most of these new mutations will not fix themselves; the gene will become polymorphic, and the original fixation will be lost. So over long timescales, the cumulative probability that a site remains unchanged becomes vanishingly small.

The probability that a fixed site has experienced no new mutations over T generations is: P(unchanged) = e^(−2NₑμT)

McCarthy’s model, necessarily corrected for continued mutation, predicts roughly 150,000 fixed differences between humans and the CHLCA. We observe approximately 20 million. The McCarthy model is therefore short by a factor of 133× even when we grant him a) an ancient Nₑ of 10,000, b) Kimura’s invariance, and c) 20 million free ancestral mutations.

The real number based on actual values is even worse for his attempted rebuttal. In utilizing the math he presented, we adjust for a) the correct ancient effective population of 3,300, b) we correct Kimura’s algebra and incorporate the correct current population of 8 billion.

See what a difference it makes:

McCarthy’s Original Calculation:

  • Population: Nₑ = 10,000 (theoretical effective population size AND theoretical current population)
  • Mutations per generation: 100 per individual × 10,000 individuals = 1,000,000
  • Fixation probability: 1/2N = 1/20,000
  • Generations: 400,000
  • Total mutations: 400 billion
  • Expected fixations: 400 billion × 1/20,000 = 20 million fixations

Corrected Calculation Using Actual Values:

  • Nₑ = 3,300 (actual ancient effective population size)
  • N = 8,000,000,000 (actual population)
  • Mutations per generation: 100 per individual × 3,300 individuals = 330,000
  • Fixation probability: 1/2N = 1/16,000,000,000
  • Generations: 400,000
  • Total mutations: 330,000 × 400,000 = 132 billion
  • Expected fixations: 132 billion × 1/16,000,000,000 = 8.25 fixations

Thus the shortfall increases from 133x to 2,424,242x when we go from the theoretical to the actual.

There is absolutely nothing Dennis McCarthy or anyone else can do at this point to salvage either natural selection or neutral theory as an adequate engine for evolution and the origin of species. The one is far too weak to account for the empirically observed genetic changes and the second is flat-out wrong. Neither of them, alone or in combination with every other suggested mechanism for evolution, can come within several orders of magnitude of the quantity required to account for the genetic divergence in humans and chimpanzees, in mice and rats, in chickens and turkeys, or in savannah and forest elephants.

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 003

IV. The Inversion of Rights

No concept is more central to the Enlightenment’s self-understanding than the idea of natural right, the inherent entitlements that belong to every human being by virtue of reason and nature, prior to and independent of any government. Life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness: these were to be the inviolable foundations upon which a just, rational, and enlightened society would be built.

The subsequent history of human rights demonstrates something the Enlightenment philosophers clearly did not anticipate and never discussed: a right without a sound basis is a right that can be redefined, expanded, contracted, and ultimately inverted by a government deemed capable of granting and defining them.

Consider the fate of intellectual freedom, that most cherished of Enlightenment values. J.B. Bury, in his 1913 History of the Freedom of Thought, offered a confident chronicle of humanity’s liberation from the shackles of religious and political censorship. The trajectory seemed clear: from the persecution of Socrates, through the medieval suppression of heresy, to the hard-won victories of the modern age, mankind was progressing toward ever-greater liberty of mind. A great scholar and the editor of The Cambridge Medieval History series, Bury wrote as a true believer in Enlightenment ideals, and his beliefs were representative of educated opinion in his time.

The subsequent century has not vindicated his optimism.

The progression—or rather, regression—is traceable through the very language of the freedom Bury celebrated. The original concept was freedom of thought. But this, upon examination, is a tautology. No external power has ever been able to reach into a man’s mind and compel his thoughts. The Inquisition could burn a heretic; it could not make him believe. Thought is already free by its very nature—it is private, inaccessible, beyond the reach of any tyrant. To proclaim “freedom of thought” as a right is to proclaim a right to what no one can take away.

The tautology was resolved by externalizing the freedom. Freedom of thought became freedom of speech: the liberty not merely to think but to express, to articulate, to attempt persuasion. The fact that freedom of speech was always fundamentally flawed and utilized primarily to defuse the blasphemy laws in Christian societies never seemed to trouble its champions, even as people were punished for perjury, slander, and other speech-related crime.

But the expansion of the right did not stop there. Freedom of speech was soon expanded into freedom of expression: not merely words but conduct, symbols, art, gesture—the full range of human communicative action. This expansion seemed natural, even inevitable. If speech is protected, why not the t-shirt with a slogan, the armband, the flag, the dance, the photograph, or the pornographic video. Expression is simply speech by other means, after all.

Even as the scope of the freedom was expanded, the Enlightenment tradition also expanded the domain of regulating speech. Once expression is the category, expression can be parsed, distinguished, and classified. Some expressions are protected; others are not. And who determines the boundaries? Those with the power to enforce them.

The terminus of this progression is now visible. In the nations most committed to Enlightenment values, the ones that pride themselves on their liberal traditions and constitutional protections, speech is criminalized today to a degree that would have astonished Bury. In Britain, in Germany, in France, in Canada, and increasingly in the United States, one may not express, and in some cases may not be permitted to hold, certain prohibited thoughts. “Hate speech” codes, “anti-discrimination” requirements, “anti-extremism” measures: the vocabulary varies, but the effect is consistent. The freedom of thought that Bury celebrated has become the regulation of expression that his heirs enforce.

The right, unmoored from any transcendent ground and no longer endowed by Man’s creator, transmogrified into anything those in power declared it to be or not to be. The freedom to think became the freedom to speak, became the freedom to express, and became the freedom to express only what is permitted, which is to say, no freedom at all. The Enlightenment’s signature achievement consumed itself through its own warped logic, and those who enforced the final inversion did so in the name of the very values they were negating.

Nor was this the only right that was modified over time. The right of free association transformed into the crime of racism. The right to worship the Christian God was reduced to the right to pray in silence so long as no one noticed. The right of self-defense was inverted into an obligation to retreat. Even the marital rights of a man to his wife and children, honored throughout the centuries, were reduced to nothing more than financial obligations.

The is not a corruption of Enlightenment principles by its enemies. To the contrary, it is the application and extension of those principles by their truest believers.

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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.

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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.

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