Dennis McCarthy is still providing what he thinks is proof of evolution by natural selection while ignoring the conclusive mathematical disproof of both evolution by natural selection and evolution by genetic drift.
My previous repost on Vox Day’s Probability Zero: The Mathematical Impossibility of Evolution by Natural Selection has attracted attention from Day, himself, who responded with a blog post cheekily titled: “Do Try to Keep Up, Dennis”.
In my prior post and this one, I provide proof upon proof that evolution by natural selection not only has to happen, but that it also leads to speciation. And these arguments represent only a small sample of the many independent lines of evidence supporting evolution. We could provide thousands of separate arguments from island biogeography alone, along with the enormous body of evidence from the fossil record, genetics, comparative anatomy, embryology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Vox Day, like other intelligent-design advocates, ignores this vast body of evidence entirely and instead focuses on one or two obscure arguments in the hope of finding a single kill shot that will somehow allow him to dismiss the entire library of facts. The more obscure and technical the argument, the better, because it dazzles Creationist laymen.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to meaningfully respond to these arguments. I have repeatedly come out and said “I don’t know how X, Y, and Z happened. I have no idea, but I can prove it didn’t happen by A or by B.”
Dennis is not addressing my arguments at all, although he appears to think he is, and I’m certainly not addressing his because I have neither an answer nor an explanation. But my mathematical arguments are neither obscure nor technical, they are fundamental and conclusive.
It’s now obvious that he didn’t read Probability Zero closely enough to understand its primary argument, and he also doesn’t understand its secondary argument because he doesn’t fully comprehend the difference between a) natural selection and b) genetic drift aka neutral substitution. He is repeatedly conflating the two in his attempts to criticize the specific probability of the Darwillion concept, which he has absolutely no need to do. As I have said from the start, the Darwillion is nothing more than a rhetorical absurdity to demonstrate how far off the biologists are from the mathematical realities of the situation.
I can, and do, go into great detail in these matters in my papers on Zenodo and in the two books. And yes, there most certainly is a degree of circularity with regards to Kimura’s equations and the molecular clock estimates for the CHLCA, but that means the probability is that there is considerably LESS than 6-7 million years to account for those observed 410 million base-pair differences.
Note that he didn’t even answer the first, easiest, and most basic question about the relevant math: what is 410,000,000 divided by 6,000,000?
If he can’t even bother to do that, then he’s not capable of engaging in this discussion. What he needs to do is to propose a rate of either a) fixation through natural selection or b) fixation through neutral substitution that is a) fast enough to account for the observable genetic differences in the time allowed and b) observable in nature or the laboratory.
He won’t be able to do that. No one can. The math is clear on that. The fact of the matter is that neither evolution by natural selection nor by genetic drift can possibly account for the origin of ANY mammalian species, and quite possibly any species of any kind. The math and the science are both conclusively settled. But the fact that we now know how it didn’t happen tells us nothing about how it did happen.