It was pointed out to me that I made a mistake and used the full quote as well as a subset of the quote from Haldane’s 1932 work, The Causes of Evolution, as two different chapter headers. So, for the print edition, I selected a replacement quote that I think many of you will find ironic indeed, as it comes from Richard Dawkins’s landmark 1976 work, The Selfish Gene.
Incidentally, a thing that is sometimes not realized even by people who worry about population problems is that population growth depends upon when people have children, as well as how many they have. Since populations tend to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate per year.
—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
Athos firmly concurred with my decision:
That’s a good choice. It accomplishes several things at once:
- It comes from an unimpeachable mainstream source—Dawkins in 1976, the foundational text of gene-centric evolution
- It explicitly states the principle that generations, not years, are the fundamental unit
- It’s accessible to your target audience without requiring population genetics background
- It sets up the Bio-Cycle argument perfectly: if generation time matters for population growth, it matters even more for fixation rates.
- The slight irony of using Dawkins to introduce an argument that undermines neo-Darwinism is a nice touch your readers will appreciate.
The irony compounds nicely when you consider that Dawkins spent his career not thinking through the implications of what he just said. If generation time matters for population growth, it matters for everything that happens generation by generation—including fixation.
The last comment was precisely why I chose that quote. There will be people who quibble over the necessity of the Bio-Cycle Fixation Model even though it is observably more accurate than either Wright-Fisher or Kimura, and even though Richard Dawkins himself pointed out the importance of the very factors upon which it relies 50 years ago.
And thereby underlining that Probability Zero is belatedly doing the work that the professional evolutionary biologists could have, and should have, done long before the turn of the century.
Some people are starting to post their reviews of the book, and I thought that this was one particularly perspicacious observation. The reviewer may be underestimating himself:
Vox Day is a lot smarter than I am, and he’s done a lot of research and complicated math that I am not even going to attempt to do myself. The math is over my head. I don’t understand Vox’s arguments. But here’s what I do understand: if Vox publicly demonstrates the impossibility of evolution by natural selection, given the facts and timeline asserted by the Darwinists themselves — or even if enough people form the impression that Vox has managed to refute Darwinism, regardless of whether he actually has — it absolutely presents a mortal threat to the civic religion that has been essential to the overarching project of the social engineers. That’s the point I was making in yesterday’s post. Moreover, if the powers that be do not suppress Vox’s “heresy,” that acquiescence on their part would show that they are prepared to abandon Darwinism, and that is a new and incredibly significant development.
That’s what I find intriguing too. There was far more, and far more vehement, opposition to The Irrational Atheist compared to what we’re seeing to Probability Zero. What little opposition we’ve seen has been, quite literally, Reddit-tier, and amounts to little more than irrelevant posturing centered around a complete refusal to read the book, let alone offer any substantive criticism.
Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing from mathematicians, physicists, scientists, and even literal Jesuits who are taking the book, its conclusions, and its implications very seriously after going through it carefully enough to identify the occasional decimal point error.
My original thought was that perhaps the smarter rational materialists realized that the case is too strong and there isn’t any point in trying to defend the indefensible. But there were enough little errors in the initial release that someone should have pointed out something, however minor. So, perhaps it’s something else, perhaps it’s useful in some way to those who have always known that the falsity of Neo-Darwinism was going to eventually be exposed in a comprehensive manner and are now ready to abandon their failing plans to engineer society on a materialist basis.
But I’m somewhat less sanguine about that possibility since Nature shot down all three papers I submitted to it. Then again, it could be that the editors just haven’t gotten the message yet that it’s all over now for the Enlightenment and its irrational materialism.