I’ve been working on a few things since finishing Probability Zero. One of those things was the release of a 10 hour and 28 minute audiobook. Another of those things was a statistical study that Athos and I just completed, and the results very strongly support Probability Zero‘s assertion of the mathematical impossibility of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Empirical Validation: Zero Fixations in 1.2 Million Loci
The MITTENS framework in Probability Zero calculates that the actual number of effective generations available for evolutionary change is far smaller than the nominal generation count—approximately 158 real generations rather than 350 nominal generations over the 7,000-year span from the Early Neolithic to the present. This reduction, driven by the collapse of the selective turnover coefficient in growing populations, predicts that fixation events should be rare, fewer than 20 across the entire genome. The Modern Synthesis requires approximately 20 million fixations over the 9 million years since the human-chimpanzee divergence, implying a rate of 2.22 fixations per year or approximately 15,500 fixations per 7,000-year period. To test these competing predictions, we compared allele frequencies between Early Neolithic Europeans (6000-8000 BP, n=1,112) and modern Europeans (n=645) across 1,211,499 genetic loci from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource v62.0.
The observed fixation count was zero. Not a single allele in 1.2 million crossed from rare (<10% frequency) to fixed (>90% frequency) in seven thousand years. The reverse trajectory—fixed to rare—also produced zero counts, ruling out population structure artifacts that would inflate both directions equally. Even relaxing the threshold to “large frequency changes” (>50 percentage points) identified only 18 increases and 60 decreases, representing 0.006% of loci showing substantial movement in either direction. The alleles present in Early Neolithic farmers remain at nearly identical frequencies in their modern descendants, despite what the textbooks count as three hundred fifty generations of evolutionary opportunity.
This result decisively favors the MITTENS prediction over the Modern Synthesis expectation. The mathematics in Probability Zero derived, from first principles, that overlapping generations, declining mortality, and expanding population size combine to reduce effective generational turnover by more than half. The ancient DNA record confirms this derivation empirically: the genome behaves as if approximately 158 generations have elapsed, not 350. But zero fixations in 1.2 million loci suggests even the limited ceiling permitted by MITTENS may be generous—the observed stasis is consistent with a system in which the conditions for fixation have become vanishingly difficult to satisfy regardless of the generation count.
Evolution by natural selection, as a mechanism of directional change capable of producing adaptation or speciation, has been empirically demonstrated to be inoperative in human populations for at least 7,000 years.
