VII. The Triveritas in Operation
The power of the Triad of Truth is best demonstrated through application. Consider the case that Part One examined in detail: the theory of evolution by natural selection.
The claim is that random mutation, filtered by natural selection operating over geological time, suffices to explain the diversity and complexity of life. This is not a modest claim; it is the keystone of Enlightenment naturalism, the demonstration that purpose and design can be eliminated from biology, the acid that dissolves teleology and leaves only mechanism.
Apply the Triveritas.
Logical validity: The argument requires that random mutation and natural selection can generate specified complexity—can produce, from simpler precursors, the integrated functional systems that characterize living organisms. The logical problems with this claim were identified almost immediately. Fleeming Jenkin, in 1867, pointed out that blending inheritance would dilute favorable variations before selection could act on them. The discovery of particulate (Mendelian) inheritance addressed this specific objection but raised others: mutations are mostly deleterious, beneficial mutations are rare, and the coordination of multiple independent mutations required for complex adaptations is probabilistically prohibitive. The logical coherence of the mechanism has never been established; it has only been assumed.
Mathematical coherence: The quantitative requirements of the theory can be specified. For humans and chimpanzees to have diverged from a common ancestor through mutation and selection, a certain number of genetic changes must have become fixed in the relevant lineages within the available time. The genomes have now been mapped; the numbers are known. Using the most generous assumptions—the longest timescales proposed, the shortest generation lengths, the fastest fixation rates ever observed in any organism—the mathematics permits fewer than three hundred fixed mutations in the human lineage. The theory requires at least twenty million. The gap is not a matter of fine-tuning or boundary conditions; it is a difference of five orders of magnitude. The math does not work. The theory is not merely unproven; it is refuted.
Empirical anchoring: The genomic data provides the anchor. The sequences are known; the differences are countable; the calculations can be performed by anyone with access to the data and competence in arithmetic. The empirical evidence does not support the theory; it falsifies it. The anchor drags the ship onto the rocks.
Neo-Darwinism fails all three elements of the Triveritas. The logic is unsound: the mechanism cannot do what is claimed. The math is wrong: the numbers do not permit it. The evidence, properly interpreted, confirms the failure rather than the success. The theory persists not because it has survived scrutiny but because the scrutiny has been suppressed, marginalized, and excluded from respectable discourse by institutional gatekeepers with careers and worldviews at stake.
This is not an isolated case. Apply the triad to classical economics: Smith’s law of supply and demand fails mathematical scrutiny (Gorman), Ricardo’s comparative advantage fails logical scrutiny (Keen’s amphiboly, the assumptions do not hold), and the empirical outcomes of free trade policies fail to match the predictions. Apply the triad to social contract theory: the contract is a logical fiction, no mathematical content exists to test, and no empirical evidence supports the claim that governments derive their authority from consent. Apply the triad to Enlightenment rights theory: the rights are asserted without derivation, have no mathematical structure, and the empirical history of rights shows consistent erosion and inversion rather than progressive realization.
The pattern is uniform. Enlightenment claims, when subjected to the Triveritas, collapse catastrophically. They survive only because the three elements of the triad has never been applied to them—because the tradition’s defenders did not deploy the logical, mathematical, and empirical tools they possessed, and because the Enlightenment’s institutional dominance ensured that the tools would not be deployed by anyone with the standing to be heard.
Veriphysics changes this. It applies the triad of logic, math, and empirical data without apology, demands accountability without deference, and exposes fraud without mercy. The Enlightenment claimed reason, mathematics, and evidence as its own; as a post-Enlightenment philosophy Veriphysics calls the bluff and demonstrates that the tradition actually held a stronger claim to reason given how the Enlightenment relied upon rhetoric in its place.