The Five Sigmas

You can trust your dark lord, because he gets amazingly physics-like results. 5 Sigma is the level on the scale that that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a discovery. 

Just a little spin on Daniel Dennett’s old Atheist Logic demotivator: you can trust biologists because physicists get amazingly accurate results.

It turns out that if you put MITTENS into physics terms, it’s reliable to the point that you could literally announce the existence of a new particle on it. In particle physics, a 3-sigma result counts as an observation and a 5-sigma result is a discovery. In 2012, the initial announcement of the Higgs Boson was made on the basis of a 5.0 sigma result from ATLAS and 4.9 sigma from CMS.

Even using a Modern Synthesis-friendly extrapolation of observed human fixation rates, the confidence level for MITTENS is 5.3 sigma. That’s how catastrophic MITTENS is for evolution by natural selection. And if their predecessors’ behavior at the 1966 Wistar Symposium is any guide, it’s going to be comical watching the biologists trying desperately, and unsuccessfully, to “correct” the math.

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