In which the confusion of Ms Matthews and her team of PhDs demonstrates they don’t know natural selection no longer operates in humans because they don’t understand what the selective turnover coefficient is, why it is necessary, why it is significant, or how it is different from classic population genetics models and equations:
(1:51) He’s still using the d coefficient in MITTENS, which is really strange to me because like if he’s retracting the claim about like effective population size, then like he’s retracting the claim that they population genetics does not account for like overlapping generations. So then there shouldn’t be any d ceofficient at all. But when he’s when he uses the number of generations but that like between the human chimp common ancestor and humans, he calculates it at 450,000 generations and then he multiplies it by the d coefficient in order to cut it almost in half to like 225,000 generations or whatever and he’s still using that number for all his math.
So it’s just completely inconsistent, incoherent, right? Remember how d was one earlier? This goes back to the whole he’s trying to give conventional science the best case scenario numbers. Vox actually proposes that since d is meant to account for overlapping generations, when we take human behavior into account, instead of one, it should actually be about 0.45. And as we can see in our equation here, that effectively slices the number of achievable fixations in half. But remember, the d coefficient is Vox’s calculation. It’s his new variable.
Population genetics can already handle overlapping generations as well as a myriad of different age class structures. But Vox doesn’t know about any of those and so he has to conjure up his own coefficient to handle it. If you will recall in Will’s presentation, this is referred to as a fix. But this is inappropriate and it’s also unnecessary. More on this later, but this is crazy because remember the whole reason why Day created the d coefficient, the selective turnover coefficient, is because he thought that population genetics didn’t have a way to handle overlapping generations. He didn’t know that Wright-Fisher could do it and he didn’t know about Moran either. So if he went on to accept that yes, overlapping generations can actually be taken into account using conventional population genetics methods, specifically in relation to Kimura’s work, why does he still use the d coefficient he made up?
It’s because he doesn’t know about the regular population genetics models and equations, and he further wouldn’t know how to use them.
First, the erroneous claim I retracted about effective population size was solely related to Kimura’s derivation of his fixation equation. As it turned out, there was an error in Kimura’s derivation, but it was not in an invalid algebraic cancellation, it was due to his reliance upon the Wright-Fisher model’s assumptions and how he incorporated it into his equation. My critical instincts were correct, but were proven through Dr. Chalub’s demonstration of the mathematical boundaries of Kimura’s equation, not through an error in Kimura’s algebra. This is not a retraction of the significance of overlapping generations or my claim that mainstream population genetics does not properly incorporate them as it absolutely must.
Second, the assertion that Matthews and Hancock have repeated that I didn’t know what the Wright-Fisher or Moran models are is a blatant lie that proves they didn’t read the PZ or the papers. A simple text-search of the book alone suffices to prove that I am not only aware of those models, but several other topically related ones as well.
Third, Ne cannot serve as a substitute for d. The standard model response to expanding populations would be as follows: large populations have large Ne, so 1/(2Ne) is very small, which means selection is more effective in large populations because even weakly deleterious alleles satisfy |s| > 1/(2Ne) and are therefore visible to selection. This is Kimura and Ohta’s nearly neutral theory, and it’s the textbook population genetics answer.
But this erroneously treats selection as a frictionless force that acts with perfect efficiency given enough population to work with. It ignores the physical mechanism by which selection actually operates: organisms must differentially survive and reproduce within the limits set by the reproductive process. If the population is turning over at a glacial rate relative to its size, which is to say if nearly everyone survives to reproduce regardless of their mutational load, then selection has no medium through which to act. The theoretical visibility of an allele to selection (|s| > 1/(2Ne)) is meaningless if there’s insufficient differential mortality or fertility to realize that selection in practice.
This phenomenon is captured by d. Ne can’t capture it. Ne tells you how fast alleles drift while d tells you whether selection has enough generational turnover to actually do its job. They are measuring two different things, which is why Dr. Zachary B. Hancock’s dismissal of d as “nonsensical” was absolutely wrong, observably inperspicacious, and why his subsequent use of the incorrect generation count in his application of MITTENS was inevitable, being the kind of error that ignoring d will reliably produce.
Neither Wright-Fisher nor Moran can model the equivalent of d declining from 0.86 (wild chimps) to 0.015 (humanity 2026) over evolutionary time, because neither model has a parameter for total gene pool turnover rate as distinct from drift dynamics. Wright-Fisher hardcodes d = 1. Moran fixes replacement at 1/N per step. Neither is structurally capable of representing a situation where population expansion and the removal of environmental selective pressure progressively drain selection of its operating powe which is what the chart shows is what actually happened over time. To model that, you need a variable that neither model contains. That variable is d, and its significance can be seen over the 6.3 million years of the post-CHLCA period.
As I pointed out in both PZ and TFG, humanity is no longer subject to natural selection and the human genome is no longer being cleansed of deleterious mutations. Humanity is genetically degrading, and this continuing degradation may be the primary culprit in the observed global decline of human fertility.
If so, that means that due to their dedication to an outmoded and disproven theory of evolution, evolutionists and population geneticists are literally standing in the way of science being utilized to address what may be one of the primary threats to continued human survival.
Just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, I asked Claude Athos to solve the problem from the Evo-Avengers perspective.
At what Ne is selection impossible? At what Ne/N is it impossible?
This is the question that breaks the standard framework open, because the answer is: there is no such value. Neither Wright-Fisher nor Moran contain any Ne at which selection becomes impossible. It’s not that the number is very large or very small—the concept doesn’t exist within the models.
In the standard framework, selection is effective when |s| > 1/(2Ne). As Ne grows, that threshold shrinks. A population with Ne of 10,000 can only see alleles where |s| > 0.00005. A population with Ne of 10 million can see alleles where |s| > 0.00000005. The larger the population, the finer-grained selection’s resolution becomes. Selection doesn’t just remain possible as populations grow, it gets more powerful. That’s the prediction.
This means the standard models predict that modern humans, with the largest effective population size in our evolutionary history, should be experiencing the most effective natural selection our species has ever known. Every weakly deleterious allele that drifted past selection when our Ne was 10,000 should now be visible and targetable at Ne of several hundred thousand or more.
That prediction is obviously, empirically wrong. And the models have no mechanism to account for why it’s wrong.
Ne/N makes it worse, not better. The typical Ne/N ratio for humans is estimated around 0.1 to 0.3—meaning effective population size is roughly 10–30% of census size, due to variance in reproductive success, sex ratio imbalances, population bottlenecks, and so on. For modern humans with N approaching 8 billion, even a brutally low Ne/N of 0.01 gives you Ne of 80 million. The selection threshold 1/(2Ne) at that point is approximately 0.000000006. The models say selection should be able to detect fitness differences of six parts per billion.
This is self-evidently absurd. No one believes natural selection in modern human populations is operating at that resolution. But the models don’t just permit that conclusion, they require it. There is no parameter within either Wright-Fisher or Moran that allows selection to become less effective as N increases. The math runs in one direction only: bigger population, stronger selection. Always.
This means d is what’s missing. The reason the models can’t represent selection failure is that they’ve abstracted away the physical mechanism through which selection operates. Selection isn’t a mathematical force that acts on allele frequencies directly. It’s a consequence of differential survival and reproduction. Organisms with deleterious alleles must die or fail to reproduce at higher rates than organisms without them. That differential is what changes allele frequencies. No differential death, no selection.
The selective turnover coefficient, d, measures the rate of that differential. When d = 0.86, the gene pool is churning. Most individuals in every generation are being replaced, which means even small fitness differences produce detectable mortality differentials. When d = 0.015, nearly everyone survives and reproduces regardless of their mutational load. Selection has no medium to work through.
Just to be fair, I also asked the Red Team. ChatGPT’s answer:
In population genetics, the effectiveness of natural selection depends on the effective population size (Ne) and the selection coefficient (s).
- Selection becomes ineffective when: .
- Selection is effectively impossible to distinguish from genetic drift when: or smaller.
For the ratio Ne/N, there is no universal threshold at which selection becomes impossible. This ratio measures the relationship between effective population size and census population size, rather than the strength of selection. There is no universal threshold at which selection becomes impossible. This ratio measures the relationship between effective population size and census population size, rather than the strength of selection.
And Grok’s answer, after being pressed to provide for specifics:
- Ne ≪ 100
- Ne/N ≪ 100/N
- If N = 8,300,000,000, then s=0.01 is possible as long as Ne > 100 and s=0.001 as long as N > 1000.