It’s truly remarkable how evolutionists will keep repeating obviously false statements over and over again, even after they have been a) shown that the statement was always false and b) told directly that they are repeating a false statement. A woman named Rebekah with a YouTube channel called Examining Origins has obviously read Probability Zero and challenged evolutionists to address its arguments there. The video already has 598 comments, and not one single one of them even demonstrates a basic grasp of the issues involved, let alone presents a coherent response.
Philalethist_Physikos: I respect your work, Rebekah! A quick word of caution to the audience on Vox Day’s formula in Probability Zero: his math assumes mutations fix strictly one after another in a single-file line. In real biology, sexual reproduction and recombination mean mutations sort across the genome simultaneously in parallel, so the math doesn’t hold up in population genetics. If you want rigorous mathematical challenges to evolutionary timescales, stick to researchers like Douglas Axe (coordinated mutations) or Walter ReMine and Royal Truman Haldane’s Dilemma and selection cost). They address real population genetics without making the single-file error!
No, literally none of my math assumes serial fixation. Not MITTENS, not the separate and unrelated math addressing the misapplication of Kimura’s steady-state identity, and not the separate and additionally unrelated math proving the impossibility of punctuated equilibrium.
I quote from yesterday’s post: The LTEE runs twelve identical populations of bacteria in parallel from the same ancestor. Every single evolutionary mechanism from natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, hitchhiking, epistasis, compensatory mutation, and frequency-dependent selection, to clonal interference operates simultaneously in all 12 populations for 85,000 generations and counting.
Which is how we know Philalethist_Physiko isn’t merely ignorant, but dishonest. He appears to have read my post, which is why he mentions “sexual reproduction and recombination” and therefore knows that recombination isn’t included in the LTEE calculations, but he still claimed that I assumed serial fixation which is not at all the case. And he also assumes that recombination will help speed up the fixation rate, which it won’t.
And to demonstrate how wildly ignorant the scientists themselves are, consider this comment from someone who claims he is a research geneticist.
brianmansfield6912: This is not ‘unresolved’. I’ve been a research geneticist for almost 40 years, perhaps I can explain the basic problem. There is a critical error in the calculations in that book. The approach he uses calculates the probability of the occurrence of the 20 million SPECIFIC substitution differences that exist between human and chimp. The correct method is to calculate the probability of ANY 20 million differences. That is, how many substitutions are expected to accumulate over 9 million years? Basic mutation rates and probability theory predict about 20 million. The problem isn’t with evolutionary theory. It would be interesting to someday find an honest creationist….
First, the Kimura equation he’s citing is inapplicable and he’s using the wrong one. The applicable Kimura equation, the time-related one, predicts six neutral mutations, not 20 million. The other Kimura equation, the steady-state identity, has been mathematically and empirically proved to be irrelevant and all the calculations based upon it are totally wrong. Genetic drift doesn’t happen in any population over 10,000. This guy has literally no idea what he’s talking about, for all that he’s waving his credentials and Dennis McCarthy’s innumerate babblings around like a flag.
Here’s another demonstration of an inability to grasp what is being analyzed by someone named Taylor:
Just took the time to actually review the paper cited at the 2 minute mark (2009, Barrick et al), and the quote is a blatant lie.
By generation 20,000, that lineage had picked up 45 mutations, or about one per 440 generations. That’s roughly three times faster than the quote says. Then a mutation that sped up mutation across the whole genome appeared around generation 26,000, and the total climbed to 653 by generation 40,000. Vox Day’s own blog attributes the 1,401 figure to a 2017 paper, not the 2009 one, and counts only beneficial fixations, which is just so clearly biased it’s unthinkable that anyone would dare actually publish it. Human genes have evolved traits like near/far sightedness, derpression, anxiety, schizophrenia, endometriosis, sickle cell anemia, and a million other non-beneficial traits. Then there are our different eye colors, hair-growth rates, toe shapes, etc. that are closer to the neutral side… So counting only “beneficial” mutations is just plainly stupid.
The other side of the problem with this quote is that it’s clearly attempting to trick readers into thinking that this observation should be understood to be some kind of universal speed limit for mutations. It’s not. The fastest rate we’ve ever “observed” is hilarious because on one had, it proves that we’ve observed evolution occurring under lab controlled conditions, AND it only sets the bar for what we’ve literally observed in lab, not what we might observe in any and every other species. For example, the largest start we’d ever observed by the early 1700’s was our own, but that didn’t mean that our sun was the largest star we could ever see.
Observing mutation rates in a lab is a massive undertaking, unless you use something incredibly small that reproduces quickly, like bacteria or mice. But also, just because we don’t observe mutations under lab controlled conditions doesn’t mean we haven’t observed them. A human newborn carries about 60 new mutations. That puts the expected human rate at tens of substitutions per generation, which just so happens to be the EXACT order of magnitude that the human–chimp divergence requires.TBH, I’d be shocked if you even take the time to read this. I’d be astounded if you listened closely enough to consider changing your mind, but I expect, like all other facts that contradict your religious beliefs, that you’ll simply ignore it and continue building your empire of willful ignorance.
It’s not “a blatant lie”. It’s a demonstration that the critic doesn’t have the first clue about the LTEE, how it works, or what it is measing. First, the number that I have cited, 1,322 generations per fixation is the AVERAGE number of fixations across the still-healthy populations across 60,000 generations, confirmed directly from the lab’s raw data. This guy is citing the Barrick 2009 paper’s results for one population: Ara-1. The critic saw that there were 45 mutations detected in that lineage. But those are total mutations detected in a single lineage, not fixations across the entire population, and it doesn’t even begin to take into account what happened in the other 11 populations. The MITTENS figure of ~1,322 generations per fixation is derived from what is now the remaining five viable populations through 60,000 generations to count mutations that actually reached ≥95% frequency in any of those five populations. Taylor is comparing apples to automobiles.
UPDATE: Sometimes I can’t tell if they’re lying or if they’re just retarded.
He claimed he addressed this, but he hasn’t. His math clearly doesn’t, and apparently either Day nor anyone defending him understands that math well enough to realize that. Day says his math accounts for simultaneous mutations and recombinations but if you actually look at his math, it doesn’t. He explains that this is the case, apparently without realizing so, several times in his book. He’s very clear on this.
The math OBVIOUSLY does address this because parallel fixation is built right into the numbers being averaged due to the nature of the LTEE experiment. And it should be immediately obvious that parallel fixation is included in the math because the average includes all the different populations evolving separately at the same time! And the math also obviously does NOT account for recombinations because bacteria do not reproduce sexually. Once more, we have a would-be critic who has no idea what he’s babbling about. He literally doesn’t know what is being measured or how it is being measured.
UPDATE: More hilarity forthcoming. It should be amusing to catalog all of the various things this retard is going to get wrong in his desperate attempt to prove that math that has been confirmed by every major AI system and more than 10 math PhDs is “stupid”. They have absolutely no idea how far ahead of them I am; they still genuinely believe k=u over time even though it was both mathematically and empirically disproved more than a decade ago by academics who are not me.
GraysonHawk: We’re all reading Vox Day’s book right now and laughing at how stupid his math is. Video incoming.