Just a reminder that I’ll be debating biologist JF Gariepy tonight at 7 PM EST on The Public Space. Place your bets; JFG’s fans appear to be of the opinion that I will be, and I quote, “rekt”.
I am, to the contrary, entirely confident that I will be presenting a critique of TENS that is, at the very least, an uncommon one, and possibly even a unique one, seeing as how it comes from an economics perspective. The only question, as far as I can tell, is if I am somehow failing to account for a critical component, otherwise, I see as little likelihood that orthodox biologists will be able respond to my critique any more successfully than free trade economists responded to my labor mobility argument.
UPDATE: buckle up. Here is the link to the debate.
VERDICT: It was a very interesting and useful conversation, in my opinion, more of a mutual exploration than a debate per se. JF quickly understood where I was going and correctly focused on the point that the simple statistical model does not address, which is the rate of parallel propagation of the mutations that become sufficiently fixed to become an ongoing part of the population. What I felt that he failed to grasp was that we were talking about maximum possible propagations, so even the addition of the parallel propagating is unlikely to provide enough padding to allow the theory to fit within the time limits.
And, as I noted, if the parallel propagating is happening as quickly as it is required in order to account for the necessary changes, we should be able to observe it more readily in the laboratory as well as in the wild.
I’ll post the summary of the crude fixed mutation model tomorrow.