Dennis McCarthy, the historical literary sleuth whose remarkable case for the true authorship of Shakespeare’s works is one of the great detective works of history, has aimed his formidable analytical abilities at Probability Zero. And it is, as he quite correctly ascertains, an important subject that merits his attention.
I believe this is one of my more important posts—not only because it explains evolution in simple, intuitive terms, making clear why it must be true, but because it directly refutes the core claims of Vox Day’s best-selling book Probability Zero: The Mathematical Possibility of Evolution by Natural Selection. Day’s adherents are now aggressively pushing its claims across the internet, declaring evolution falsified. As far as I am aware, this post is the only thorough and effective rebuttal to its mathematical analyses currently available.
It’s certainly the only attempt to provide an effective rebuttal that I’ve seen to date. Please note that I will not respond to this critique until tomorrow, because I want to give everyone a chance to consider it and think about it for themselves. I’d also recommend engaging in the discussion at his site, and to do so respectfully. I admire Mr. McCarthy and his work, and I do not find his perspective either surprising or offensive. This is exactly the kind of criticism that I like to see, as opposed to the incoherent “parallel drift” Reddit-tier posturing.
The book is first and foremost what I like to call an end-around. It does not present a systematic attack on the facts just presented—or, for that matter, any of the vast body of empirical evidence that confirms evolution. It sidesteps entirely the biogeographical patterns that trace a continuous, unbroken organic thread that runs through all regions of the world, with the most closely related species living near each other and organic differences accruing with distance; the nested hierarchies revealed by comparative anatomy and genetics; the fossil record’s ordered succession of transitional forms (see pic); directly observed evolution in laboratories and natural populations; the frequency of certain beneficial traits (and their associated genes) in human populations, etc.
Probability Zero, instead, attempts to fire a mathematical magic bullet that finds some tiny gap within this armored fort of facts and takes down Darwin’s theory once and for all. No need to grapple with biology, geology, biogeography, fossils, etc., the math has pronounced it “impossible,” so that ends that.
Probability Zero advances two principal mathematical arguments intended to show that the probability of evolution is—as its title suggests—effectively zero. One centers on the roughly 20 million mutations that have become fixed (that is, now occur in 100% of the population) in the human lineage since our last common ancestor with chimpanzees roughly 9 million years ago. Chimpanzees have experienced a comparable number of fixed mutations.
Day argues that this is impossible given the expected number of mutations arising each generation and the probability that any particular neutral mutation reaches fixation—approximately 1 in 20,000, based on estimates of ancestral human population size. Beneficial mutations do have much higher fixation probabilities, but the vast majority of these ~20 million substitutions are neutral.
Read the whole thing there. Mr. McCarthy is familiar with the relevant literature and he is not an innumerate biologist, which is what makes this discussion both interesting and relevant.
As I said before, I will refrain from saying anymore here or on SG, and I will refrain from commenting there, until I provide my own response tomorrow. But I will say that I owe a genuine debt to Mr. McCarthy for drawing my attention to something I’d overlooked…