Thanks to Big Bear’s interview on Tucker, people hitherto unfamiliar with me or my work have been purchasing PROBABILITY ZERO, the second edition of which I’m just finishing now. I’ve mostly replaced the appendices; Dr. Tipler’s is the only one that makes a second appearance, and one thing that I finally looked into was a particularly stupid objection that has been raised by innumerate evolutionists from the very first time I posted about MITTENS back in February 2019.
The objection is to using the bacterial fixation rate due to the fact that humans mutate faster than bacteria. This is true, but I never bothered to engage on that point because it’s always been irrelevant. Humans obviously, and observably, fixate more slowly than bacteria, and it’s the population-wide mutational fixations that matter, not the mutations that pop up in every individual, don’t get passed on to anyone, and die with them.
And yet, every time the fixation problem is pointed out, every time the simple observation is made that natural selection cannot possibly fix mutations fast enough to account for the genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees in the time permitted, this one reflexive objection is inevitably raised before the critic has even looked at a single equation, and it is always delivered with the confidence of a closing argument:
You’re comparing humans to bacteria. But humans mutate faster. The bacterial rate doesn’t apply!
Fine. If we’ve learned one thing from the Triveritas, is it this: do the math! Let’s grant the evolutionist his premise in its strongest form. Humans do mutate faster than E. coli on a per-site basis. The human point-mutation rate is roughly 120 times the bacterial rate per base pair per generation. We will give them that 120x, free of charge. We’ll even leave out the obvious problem of the fact that most human mutations are harmful, most of those left are neutral, and only a tiny fraction are even potentially suitable for fixation.
Forget all that. We’ll give them every single mutation as beneficial, fitness-enhancing, and capable of propagating to fixation. We’ll pretend that the 120-fold mutation-rate advantage translates directly into a 120-fold fixation-rate advantage. Now, the fastest fixation rate ever measured in any organism, under any conditions, is the one observed in the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with E. coli: one beneficial fixation per approximately 1,400 generations. That is the empirical ceiling. Nothing in nature has been observed to fix beneficial mutations faster. And now we’ll give humans that unearned 120x boost:
1,400 ÷ 120 ≈ 12 generations per fixation
One fixation every twelve generations. That is an absolutely blistering rate in genetic terms. It means that all 8.2 billion humans on the planet carry a new gene pair that first mutated into existence sometime around the year 1726. Believe it or not, this is, in terms of pure reproductive mathematics, possible. If that first mutant had 7 children, and each child carried the mutation, survived to reproductive age, and also had 7 children who all carried the mutation, and so on for the next 10 generations, that mutation would be fixed in the human population this year.
At least, it would be if the mutation was somehow more competitive than any human mutation in history. This fixation process would require a selection coefficient of s = 49, which would be extraordinary considering that s = 0.001 is normal. But let’s grant that too! Let’s give the evolutionists a selection advantage that is 49,000x stronger than is customarily observed in human biology. In case you’re keeping track, we’ve so far granted a 5,880,000x advantage to the standard Neo-Darwinian model.
Now, at 6.3 million years since the human lineage split from the chimpanzee lineage, that provides us with 201,600 effective generations that are available. One fixation per twelve generations gives us the following equation:
201,600 generations ÷ 12 generations per fixation = 16,800 fixations
Sixteen thousand eight hundred fixations. That is the maximum available even after we granted a free 5.9 million-fold head start. Against that, we have to account for the number of fixations required on the human lineage side, which is 205 million base pairs.
16,800 ÷ 205,000,000 = 0.008 percent
All of that got us less than one percent of the way there. Not within a factor of two. Not even within an order of magnitude. The boosted, error-inflated, absolute best-case-on-best-case figure still manages to account for less than one hundredth of one percent of the requirement. The genetic shortfall is 12,200x even after we grant the objecting evolutionist everything he could ask for and more.