In which EF runs my Hard Limits paper past Gemini and asks it a few questions:
Plugging arguments in from your “Hard Limits…” paper pushes Gemini into a corner. These concessions were interesting:
From Gemini:
“- Many mammalian species only exist in the fossil record for 1 to 2 million years before going extinct or splitting into new daughter species.-If a species’ lifespan is shorter than (4N_{e}) generations, almost nothing that arises during that species’ existence will ever actually fix via drift while that species exists. Instead, the species remains in a permanent state of transient polymorphism—carrying an unresolved backlog of genetic variation from its ancestors until it either goes extinct or passes that unresolved pipeline onto a new descendant lineage.”
Gemini’s answer? Population crashes. The final line of defense is apparently what you already correctly predicted it would be: One local deme replacing all the rest.
When confronted with the contradiction, Gemini throws in the towel:
“The core of this argument is a devastating conceptual checkmate: If you invoke a bottleneck or deme replacement to explain how a neutral allele finally fixed across a species, you have abandoned the premise of a large population.”
Indeed. Nice work, Vox. Thanks for your book.
A lot of people haven’t understood yet that Neutral Drift aka substitution is not a viable retreat from the impossibility of evolution by natural selection.
And the bottlenecks and demes are not a viable retreat from the conceptual checkmate of the Hard Limits, because I’ve done the math on that as well. The most a bottleneck accomplishes at the optimal population level, on the low-percentage chance that the species survives, is to reduce the fixation time by one-half, which isn’t enough to make a difference.
The irony is that Erika and the Evo-Avengers are still failing to comprehend the significance of MITTENS and the LTEE, while their lines of defense have also been preemptively destroyed before they can even fall back to them.