Since Erika isn’t a sufficiently big girl to defend her own field of science from a game designer with no academic or scientific credentials at all, I’m reliably informed that she’s going to have DOCTOR ZACH HANCOCK white-knight for her and offer his no doubt Very Serious and Very Credentialed Critique of Probability Zero.
That’s right, THE DOCTOR. ZACH HANCOCK! I’m sure you’re all aquiver with dread and awe.
And since Dr. Hancock, like the intrepid Brian, is a POPULATION GENETICIST, it should be very amusing to watch him demonstrate that he doesn’t know the first thing about the math that serves as the sand beneath his science. But I’m anticipating we’re going to hear all about ISLANDS and DEMES and STEPPING STONES, which should not only offer us an expanded vocabulary, but entirely new ways of amusing ourselves at the expense of midwits in labcoats who never realized there was rather more to understanding science than memorizing the textbook.
It truly amazes me that these people never, ever, stop to consider who and what they’re dealing with. First, they claim that I’m a white supremacist… and they think that’s some sort of sign that I don’t know the math? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall a certain group of Aryan supremacists who were very, very good with math, so much so that the US science community imported a whole collection of them in the middle of the 20th Century for one reason or another.
Second, they know I’m a game designer. Not only that, but a game designer who is very heavily involved with artificial intelligence. And yet, they keep being surprised that I know what they’re going to say on the subject before they say it. Which is amusing, considering that I can already tell what Zach Hanson will have for lunch next Thursday with a 87 percent chance of success.
If you doubt that these credentialed scientists are really as dumb and innumerate as I’ve been pointing out, consider this lunatic trying to correct someone who is explaining the concept of an AVERAGE to him. Like JFG, he literally doesn’t understand what an AVERAGE RATE is.
“When dealing with average rates, it really doesn’t matter if particular fixations happen parallel or in sequence. We could have 25 fixations in sequence over a timeframe, or we could have 20 parallel and five in sequence over the same timeframe. The average is the same “
This is mathematically false.
No. It’s not mathematically false. It’s not false at all. It’s literally what an average rate means!
If you drove ten miles and it took you an hour, then it makes no difference if you were driving sixty miles an hour part of the time or you were stopped part of the time, or even if you turned around and drove back home to pick up something you forgot. The AVERAGE RATE of 10 MPH covers all of those possibilites and more.
And don’t forget, we already know how many of those fixations happened in parallel and how many did not because the data is available in 500-generation slices. For example, Ara+2 had 66 fixations in 60,000 generations. At 909 generations per fixation, this was one of the fastest still-viable populations. There were 14 fixation events and every single one of them was sequential. The smallest gap between fixations was 1,500 generations. The largest gap was 9,500 generations.
So there were zero parallel fixations in 60,000 generations. None whatsoever. That’s not theory. That’s the actual empirical evidence from the most famous experiment in evolution. And to answer the obvious question how you can get 66 fixations out of 14 fixation events, the answer is simple: sweeps. Each selective serial fixation carried along an average of 5.3 neutral mutations to fixation with it.
I ran the numbers across all 12 of the populations to make sure this wasn’t an anomaly. There were ZERO parallel events, none in any of the five viable populations and none in the seven hypermutating populations. The smallest gap between fixation events was the 1,500 generations in Ara+2. The largest gap was 10,500 generations in Ara-6.
In fact, what we’re seeing here is empirical evidence for what I mathematically demonstrated with the Bernoulli Barrier. Which means the third edition of Probability Zero is going to be a doozy.