Author: VD

Haitian Invasion Update

Major Offensive by Salvadoran Commandos Against Armed Gangs in Forested Areas

Salvadoran special forces are said to have launched a major land and air military operation in the forested areas where several armed groups operating in Haiti have entrenched themselves. According to reports, around twenty gang members, including a leader known by the pseudonym “Commandant Galaxy,” are said to have been neutralized during this offensive.

The operation reportedly involved the use of drones and combat helicopters. Airstrikes are said to have targeted several fortified camps serving as rear bases for the armed groups, with the aim of dismantling their strategic positions. At the same time, commandos are said to have intervened at the residence of a gang leader nicknamed “Ezol.” This operation is said to have resulted in the liberation of 18 people held captive, including 12 young girls who are said to have been victims of sexual exploitation and used as leverage to extort ransoms from their families. A significant sum of money, estimated at over a million dollars, is also said to have been discovered inside the residence.

El Salvador Rejects Any Negotiation with Gang Leaders

In response to the intensification of operations, several gang leaders are said to have attempted to make contact with Salvadoran authorities to negotiate their departure from Haitian territory. A proposal that is said to have been categorically rejected by the President of El Salvador, who is said to have ordered the continuation of the offensive against the armed groups. On the ground, several criminal factions are said to be in flight, seeking refuge in forested areas. They are said to be tracked by surveillance drones and targeted by airstrikes carried out by combat helicopters.

An Operation Announced Until the Dismantlement of the Gangs

Salvadoran authorities are said to affirm that the operation will continue until security is restored and a normal situation returns in Haiti, without the presence of armed groups controlling territories. The Salvadorans are said to be welcomed by scenes of acclaim from certain populations, who see this intervention as a hope for regaining peace and security.

For now, the fate of the powerful gang leader known as “Barbecue” remains uncertain. He remains unlocated, as operations continue against the various armed groups.

Looks like a little mission creep might be creeping in. President Bukele may want to step in and remind those Salvadoran authorities that the mission is to a) retrieve their four citizens, b) kill those responsible, and c) return to El Salvador. Restoring a nonexistent security to Haiti is not going to happen without large-scale genocide.

This is exactly how the seeds of failure are often sown in victory.

Always slap down hard those commanders who get excited about the success of the mission and want to extend it. The irony is that those mission creepers were often naysayers about the original mission.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika and the Evo-Avengers 010

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 my misunderstanding of the way in which Kimura derived his fixation equation, which was based upon how it was explained to me by the mainstream textbooks. As it turned out, there was a genuine error in Kimura’s derivation, but it was not in an invalid algebraic cancellation, it was the result of his reliance upon the Wright-Fisher model’s assumptions and how he incorporated it into his equation. My critical instincts about the effects of population growth on fixtation were correct, but they were proven through Dr. Chalub’s demonstration of the time-related boundaries of the applicability of Kimura’s equation instead of a nonexistent error in Kimura’s algebra. That correction was not a retraction of the significance of overlapping generations or of my claim that mainstream population genetics does not properly incorporate overlapping generations as it absolutely must.

Second, Matthews and Hancock have repeatedly asserted that I didn’t know about the Wright-Fisher or other population genetics models is a blatant lie that underlines the fact that they didn’t read the book 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. For example, here is a quote from Chapter One of the first edition of Probability Zero. Emphasis added.

When population geneticists use the term “generation,” they mean something very different than the way the word is utilized in reference to the Boomers, the Millennials, and Generation X. In the two standard models—the Wright-Fisher model and its subsequent revision by Kimura—a “generation” represents the entire population. This is so important, I’m going to repeat it so that you will remember it. IN STANDARD FIXATION MODELS, A GENERATION REPRESENTS THE ENTIRE POPULATION.

Furthermore, I specifically addressed the distinction between d and other population genetics models that address overlapping generations in some way in Appendix A of the first edition of Probability Zero.

Classical population genetics assumes discrete, non-overlapping generations. For species with generation overlap, Hill (1972) and Felsenstein (1971) derived corrections for effective population size (Ne), which governs genetic drift. However, no equivalent correction has been derived for the rate of allele frequency change under directional selection. We derive the Selective Turnover Coefficient (d) from demographic first principles and show that d is mathematically distinct from Hill’s Ne /(N1T) ratio.

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: Nes≪1.
  • Selection is effectively impossible to distinguish from genetic drift when: Nes≈1 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.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Gemini and the Hard Limits

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

World War Wrath

I’ll admit that I really don’t think about my early novels at all. Which is the main reason Castalia hasn’t bothered to get them back into print for years, even though they’re fairly decent as your average fantasy novel goes. I think The Wrath of Angels, in particular, holds up rather well over time, although the first two definitely show my inexperience as a novelist.

Anyhow, when Castalia Unlimited launches in November, they will be exclusively available there, as are dozens of never-before translated books such as The Okehazama Campaign, a military history of the battles that established Oda Nobunaga as the unquestioned power in Japan and somehow, despite its very small scale, somehow set the stage for the military unification of the new shogunate, as well as juvenile science fiction novels like The Undersea City from the father of Japanese science fiction, Unno Juza.

You can sign up for the pre-launch mailing list now at Castalia Unlimited. There are already 120 titles loaded and we expect to have 175 available at launch and 250 by the end of the year. While we won’t have the estimated 7 million titles available on the newly renamed Kindle+, we arguably have more good books available for you to choose from, and not only that, but you get to keep them.

DISCUSS ON SG

Island-Hopping to Iran

Larry Johnson believes he knows what the “Trump” administration’s “insane plan” is. And if he’s right, it’s not a good one:

Here is how I understand it came together. The week of October 19, Trump was presented with a menu of options for a renewed war on Iran. The plans were not drawn up by the Joint Staff’s J5, the Pentagon’s chief planning directorate, but by the J5 at Central Command, the headquarters that will actually fight the war. Trump, my source says, chose the option of seizing one or more islands. Murphy’s “insane” comment, after his briefing, fits that choice. Murphy has not publicly named the targets. Analysts discussing his briefing have mentioned Kharg, Iran’s main oil export terminal, and Qeshm, the large island that sits across the Strait of Hormuz.

And then, on October 29, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the Joint Staff’s J5. The Pentagon says he was removed for leaking classified information and failing polygraph tests. Two other Pentagon sources told CBS those accusations are false. What I am told, and what other analysts have heard from their own sources, is that Sylvia opposed the island plan…

The traditional way to take an island is an amphibious landing: ships, landing craft, Marines wading ashore. That is almost certainly off the table. Any American amphibious ship that sails into the Persian Gulf puts itself inside range of Iranian anti-ship missiles, drones, mines and fast attack boats. Kharg sits about 16 miles off Iran’s coast. Larak, near Qeshm, sits just a few miles off it. Sending a big-deck amphibious ship into that space is an invitation for the first American capital ship to be lost to enemy fire since the Second World War. Even Proceedings, the Naval Institute’s own journal, ran an analysis in April warning that the Navy might not be able to get close enough to launch amphibious vehicles at all.

That leaves the air. Either you drop paratroopers or you land C-130 transports on the island and offload troops. Here is the arithmetic problem. A C-130 carries fewer than 100 combat-loaded troops, and typically somewhere between 64 and 92 paratroopers, depending on the model. To put 1,000 soldiers or Marines on the ground, you need at least a dozen sorties, and far more once you add vehicles, ammunition, water, medical teams and air defense. Every one of those aircraft is a large, slow, unarmored target flying into airspace where Iran has had years to position short-range air defenses and shoulder-fired missiles. One aircraft shot down on approach and you have lost a company.

The first wave also has to secure the runway before anyone else can land, and we know who gets that job. Airfield seizure is the signature mission of the 75th Ranger Regiment. It is what the Rangers did at Point Salines in Grenada in 1983, at Rio Hato in Panama in 1989 and at Objective Rhino in Afghanistan in 2001. Ranger battalions are reportedly already in the theater, and they would almost certainly be handed the mission of jumping in and seizing the strip so the C-130s can follow. These are the finest light infantry in the world. They are also light infantry: lightly armed, carrying what they can jump with, and dependent on everything that comes in behind them. In Grenada and Panama, the defenders could not shell the airfield from the mainland a few miles away. Here, Iran can. Iran also knows the Rangers’ playbook as well as anyone who has read the history, which means it knows exactly which runway to watch. Sending the Rangers to seize an airfield within sight of the Iranian coast is asking America’s best to hold the door open in a room that is already on fire.

The landing is not even the hard part. The hard part is the day after. Once American troops are on the island, they are sitting a few miles from the Iranian coast with no hardened fortifications, inside range of Iranian artillery, rockets, ballistic missiles and swarms of drones. Iran will not need to retake the island. It will simply shell it, around the clock, for as long as the Americans choose to stay. And the Americans will be defending themselves with the same depleted interceptor stocks Miller describes, against targets that are cheap for Iran to build and expensive for us to stop.

Then there is resupply. A Marine Expeditionary Unit carries enough to sustain itself for roughly 15 days. After that, every bullet, every gallon of fuel, every bottle of water and every replacement part has to arrive by air or by sea, through the same gauntlet that made the landing so dangerous. Casualties have to go out the same way. That means an endless air bridge of vulnerable transports, or ships parked inside the Gulf, or both. The island becomes a hostage, and the American public watches the casualty count rise every evening on the news.

And what would it achieve? Seizing a couple of small islands near the Strait does not neutralize Iran’s long southern coastline, which is where the missiles and drones that threaten shipping are actually launched. Taking Kharg would cut into Iran’s oil exports, but Iran has other terminals, and the most likely response would be more strikes on the Gulf states’ oil and water infrastructure, the infrastructure that is already being held together with tape. We would be trading a symbolic flag-raising for a permanent target.

If this is the plan – and it might only be a smoke screen – it’s right up there with The Bay of Pigs. It wouldn’t be even remotely surprising if the US military refused its orders from a fake Commander in Chief.

Because whatever that is pretending to be the President of the United States, it’s not Donald Trump.

DISCUSS ON SG

STAR WARS and the Boomer History

This is an intriguing essay on the way in which the dreadful way Star Wars turned out was due to it being, in essence, an artistic expression of the Boomer view of history:

Every generation has a founding myth. The boomers did not earn theirs. It was handed to them, and they spent it like an inheritance, down to the last penny, on themselves.

The fathers paid for that story in blood. They came home and said very little about it. What the sons did with it is the charge. They took one war and made it the only war. They took one enemy and made him the template for every enemy. They took a vast, tragic, morally tangled contest between great powers and flattened it into a passion play with two parts available for casting: the liberator and the monster. Then they cast themselves.

That is the boomer view of history. Everything before 1945 is prologue. Everything after is a rerun. Every opponent is Hitler. Every inherited custom is a milepost on the road to the camps. Every institution older than they are is suspect, and demolishing it counts automatically as liberation. History stops being a contest of houses, orders, interests and loyalties, each with a real claim, and becomes a Sunday school pageant where virtue belongs to whoever is holding the hammer.

Notice how little thinking this permits. An aristocratic education reads history as tragedy: competing goods, statesmen choosing between evils, orders that rise and rot by their own internal logic. Thucydides. Clarendon. Burke. The boomer education forbids all of it. No tragedy, only villainy. No competing goods, only the righteous and the damned. Ask an honest question about the founding myth and you have confessed to being the monster. The range of permitted debate is narrow by design, and it is policed by people who could not survive a wider one.

The result is sterility. A civilization that can tell only one story cannot understand itself, cannot understand its rivals, and cannot explain why orders endure or collapse. It cannot discuss power at all except as evil, which is extremely convenient, because it means never having to account for its own. And while refusing to discuss power, it built an order of its own: moralizing, incurious, and sealed against challenge, because every challenger had already been assigned the villain’s costume before he opened his mouth.

If you wanted that worldview on film, you would build a galaxy of liberators and monsters with nothing permitted in between. Lucas built exactly that. Star Wars is the boomer view of history in its purest available form, which is why it is the best evidence we have against them.

It is really remarkable what a hold Star Wars had on the culture, considering that it was actually about one and one-third good movies. Even though I absolutely loved the first movie, I realized about the time they reached the Ewok planet during Jedi that I’d fundamentally lost interest in the story after the evacuation of Hoth.

I was lured in by the long-awaited making of the first prequel movie, and attended it with my best friend with whom I’d seen Star Wars at the age of seven, and our wives. I walked out of The Phantom Menace shaking my head, and haven’t seen a single Star Wars movie or television show since.

DISCUSS ON SG

EU-Backed Coup in Poland

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has attempted an Orange Revolution-style coup in Poland, backed by the European Union:

On the night of this Friday, strong units of the Polish Police have cordoned off the headquarters of the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw, in the open outbreak of a prolonged crisis over the composition of the body’s leadership, which has for months pitted Prime Minister Donald Tusk against his two main political adversaries: the leader of Law and Justice and former head of Government, Jaroslaw Kaczinski, and the current president of the country, Karel Nawrocki.

The institutional clash dates back to the beginning of this year, when Nawrocki, an ally of Kaczinski, refused to swear in three of the six magistrates appointed by Parliament. To this blockade was added the president of the Constitutional Court, Bogdan Swieczkowski, who refused to allow the judges elected by the current parliamentary majority to take office.

Hours before the Police were deployed, the Polish official agency PAP reported that Swieczkowski and his number two, Bartlomiej Sochanski, had been suspended for a month and that their profiles had disappeared from the court’s website by order of Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska.

Given the seriousness of the situation, Nawrocki has canceled his official trip to Senegal and has announced that he is returning to the country. “At a time like this, the president must be in Poland,” he declared, while Kaczinski, also through social networks, denounced that the court is suffering an “attack” by the “services of Tusk” in an unprecedented episode on a “global scale”.

According to the leader of Law and Justice, “From today, Poland becomes a police state, and from there there is already a direct path to authoritarianism, and then to totalitarianism. The Tribunal is the guarantee of our freedom and sovereignty. Tusk’s trampling of the law knows no limits”.

Considering what has happened to the people of Ukraine since the Kiev regime took control, they would do well to make sure that the Eurofascists are not successful with a second “coup for democracy”.

Clown World is getting desperate. I expect this means that there will be escalation in the Middle East soon. Stay frosty and well-stocked.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika and the Evo-Avengers 009

Dr. Zach Hancock, a population geneticist who allegedly teaches the subject as an Assistant Professor at Augusta University, left a comment defending himself after Will Duffy repeatedly called him out for his lackluster and uninformed response to Probability Zero in Will’s recent appearance on the Gutsick Gibbon channel. At least, I think that was supposed to be the purpose, although it appears to be more of a public exhibition of self-destruction than self-defense.

My thoughts: 1. At 33:42, Will quotes Vox Day being upset no one wants to read his book. It’s simple. If we (scientists) stopped to read every crackpot book that claims to overturn our field, we’d never get any science done. There are real scientists writing groundbreaking work that I sadly haven’t gotten around to reading yet. The reason we don’t want to read his book is because he’s irrelevant. Furthermore, Will claims to present Vox’s argument. Thus, any misunderstanding on mine or Erika’s part is a fault on Will, not our willingness to read the book. If a student of mine doesn’t understand natural selection after I present a lecture on it, I don’t say, “Well, it’s because you didn’t read Darwin’s Origin!” I own that I did a bad job teaching the argument.

That is a blatant lie. Will did not quote me about being upset. He did not quote me as being upset because I never said that I was. I am not even remotely upset that my credentialed critics haven’t read Population Zero. To the contrary, as Will literally quoted me, I predicted on September 23, 2026 that they would not read the book.

“I do not expect anyone to actually (a) talk to me or (b) read the book. I don’t know what it is about biologists, population geneticists, and other science enthusiasts, but they always seem to imagine they can effectively critique anything without bothering to actually learn anything about it.”

This does not upset me. To the contrary, it leads me to believe they are tremendously stupid for saying one single word about a book they haven’t read.

Back in the day, I was a game reviewer nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and I also reviewed games for Computer Gaming World. I would occasionally go without food or sleep in order to play through an entire game in order to meet a CGW deadline, because neither Johnny Wilson nor Chris Lombardi permitted a reviewer to write a review for a game without completing it first. The real challenge was to do so without using the provided cheat codes. I wrote the cover review for id Software’s Heretic after playing it through in 18 hours straight and it took a week before I could close my eyes without strafing. So I have nothing but deep contempt for these fake reviewers who observably and self-admittedly have no idea what they’re talking about.

There is nothing wrong with being too busy to engage with new ideas. The problem is that Hancock is trying to simultaneously engage and not-engage with these new ideas, which is both nonsensical and pointless. And if he’s so busy, then why is he wasting all these hours on what amounts to nothing more than a pseudo-scientific Maoist struggle session? I suspect the actual reason is that he suspects the mathematical structures of his field are shaky and he’s afraid to look too closely at precisely how precarious its foundations are.

Will is not responsible for teaching anyone anything. Dr. Zachary Hancock, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Augusta University, is not his student. If Dr. Hancock isn’t going to read the book, that’s absolutely fine, but then he should sit down and shut the fuck up because all he’s going to accomplish is to demonstrate that he’s not only ignorant, but stupid and unprofessional as well.

At 34:38, Will states that Day’s d is “still necessary.” If true, then he shouldn’t have set it equal to 1 when he presented it. Furthermore, the reason that “d” is not a variable in population genetics is because it’s nonsensical. How fast the entire gene pool turns over is not meaningful, because alleles are not turning over and appearing all at once, but are staggered through time. Will flashes the “d formula” on the screen, claims there are variables not accounted for, but doesn’t define any of the variables in the equation to support this claim. Yet again, this is a “read Vox’s book” moment. No. You are making the argument. Explain it. If you can’t, don’t make it.

The necessity of a variable is not determined by what it happens to be set at when it is presented. Hancock also dismisses the selective turnover coefficient by asserting that “how fast the entire gene pool turns over is not meaningful, because alleles are not turning over and appearing all at once, but are staggered through time.” This is a non sequitur. Rates are by definition averages of staggered events. The SNP mutation rate is an average of mutations that don’t all happen at once. The fixation rate is an average of fixations that don’t all happen at once. Dismissing a rate because the underlying events are staggered would invalidate every single rate in population genetics. Hancock either needs to show that d is internally incoherent or that the generational overlap it measures is adequately captured by existing parameters. He does neither.

His complaint about Will not defining d for him is ludicrous because there is both an entire chapter and an appendix that not only defines the selective turnover coefficient, but shows its derivation, provides the empirical evidence for it, as well as explains why it is necessary and how it is different from the various things that Hancock incorrectly believed do the same thing.

Ironically, Hancock himself illustrates the need for d later in his comments. This simply underlines how stupid he is for attempting to criticize a book that he hasn’t read. Sit down and shut the fuck up, Zachary. You are clearly and observably too short for this ride.

At 37:00, Will makes the claim, apparently first pointed out by his popgen teacher, Griffiths, that the fixation equation I showed is derived explicitly for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), not structural variation. I have no idea where either of them came up with that. At no point does the fixation equations I presented distinguish between mutational types, whether explicitly or implicitly. The mutation rate I initially use is for SNPs, but the adjustment to 76.8 for a haploid genome, following the correction, modifies that rate to include structural variants as well. That is, u = (3e9)*(76.8) = 2.56e-8, not the 1.2e-8 I used for the SNP calculation.

Amusingly, Hancock makes a major error in the process of claiming his critics don’t understand the math. He writes: “The mutation rate I initially use is for SNPs, but the adjustment to 76.8 for a haploid genome, following the correction, modifies that rate to include structural variants as well.”

He’s saying he swapped mutation rates mid-calculation. He started with the SNP rate (~1.2×10⁻⁸ per site per generation), then switched to 76.8 mutations per haploid genome per generation (from Perubski et al.), which includes structural variants. He claims the fixation equation is indifferent to mutation type in an attempt to justify his switch as being valid.

But it’s not. The ~35 million divergent sites between humans and chimps that are the 1.09% divergence figure are measured in single nucleotide differences. If you inflate your mutation rate to include structural variants, then you need to compare your predicted fixation count against the total divergence, not against the SNP-only divergence. You cannot use a total mutation rate as the input and then validate the output against a fraction of the genome that omits 98.91 percent of the total. And being a mathematician, Griffiths was absolutely correct to flag it, as I previously did as well. Zach’s claim that “at no point does the fixation equation distinguish between mutational types” is totally irrelevant with regards to the empirical application of where all those expected neutral mutations happened to fix.

Again, Zachary really needs to sit down and shut the fuck up. Both a game designer and a billiards player clearly and observably understand his job better than he does.

4. At 38:04, Will states I use the wrong generation number (252,000 instead of 201,600). Again, I used the number that Will presented. What Will should be doing here is saying, “I was wrong, I presented the wrong number.” Again, this would be as if I taught a concept incorrectly and then blamed my students for not reading the textbook and catching my mistake. You are the one making the argument, Will. Own it and get it right.

That’s exactly what d does, you absolute fucking moron. When d=1, as in the Wright-Fisher model, there are 252,000 generations separating the CHLCA from modern humanity. When d=0.80, as the weighted time-average that corrects for overlapping human generations over that period works out to be, that leaves 201,600 effective generations available. This is one of the many reasons why Hancock should have read the book before ever opening his mouth in the first place. Notice that contrary to what Hancock previously said, neither Wright-Fisher nor Moran accounts for this correction, which is precisely why the selective turnover coefficient was developed in the first place.

5. Lastly, at 38:11, we get the most bizarre claim yet. He seems to believe that the 1.09% of divergent sites are the *only ones that could have diverged neutrally*. About 90% of the human genome lacks signs of selective constraint. This means that since we diverged from chimps, any of those sites could have been the ones that alternatively fixed between us. But which ones actually fix is entirely random. Rerun the clock, and a different 1.09% would fix. The fact that only 1.09% have fixed is a testament of the recency of our divergence, not that those were the only one’s that could fix. There’s nothing special about those sites. This is like being shocked when a random number generator spits out a specific number. For me, the most frustrating thing here is that no one has yet addressed why the classical population genetic fixation formulas are incorrect. There have been quibbles about mutation rates, whether or not we read Vox’s book, and what his coefficients mean. But the fact is that Vox’s model is refuted by basic population genetics from the 1930s that I derived already. And we have seen clearly that both Will and Griffiths don’t understand them, or they wouldn’t make the “explicitly relies on SNP” argument. Will seems to suggest that Griffiths, Day, and myself are going to have some meeting of the minds to work this all out and get to the bottom of it. This is frankly insulting. It’s like telling a surgeon that your accountant buddy is going to join at the operating table to help figure out the surgery.

At this point, we have no choice but to conclude that Dr. Zach Hancock is quite literally retarded. Was he some sort of diversity hire or something? First, WE are the ones who pointed out that the neutral mutations have to apply to the entire genome. HE is the one who tried to apply all of them to the 1.09 percent SNP divergence. Second, he’s flat-out lying again because I have specifically addressed why the classical population genetic fixation formulas are incorrect. You can read the papers for yourself; and don’t let the titles mislead you, as each one directly addresses a specific population genetic formula, from Wright-Fisher and Haldane to Kimura and Ohta.

k ≠ μ: The Finite-Time Collapse of Neutral Substitution Theory

The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift

Relictation: A Third Evolutionary Mechanism

The Selective Turnover Coefficient: Distinguishing Selection from Drift in Age-Structured Populations

Independent Confirmation of Haldane’s Limit: Empirical Validation Through Observed Fixation Rates

The Bernoulli Barrier: How Parallel Fixation Violates the Law of Large Numbers

While I am perfectly willing to engage in a public discussion of the issues raised by Population Zero, I very much doubt there is any purpose in including Dr. Zach Hancock in any discussion of evolution that involves mathematics. He is neither intelligent enough nor well-read enough to meaningfully participate in one.

And Dr. Zachary B. Hancock’s PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Texas A&M clearly isn’t worthy of serving as toilet paper in a roadside Taco Bell.

DISCUSS ON SG

Fourth Time’s the Charm

A U.S. Senator from Connecticut says that “Trump” is going to restart the Iran war after the mid-terms:

Trump is reportedly planning to restart war with Iran after the election. Some of us have been briefed on the war plan. And while I cannot disclose any details, I can say this: the plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives and will set off a new cycle of escalation.

Well, this may explain why so many governments around the world have been warning their citizens to stock up on supplies. If you don’t already, I’d be sure to have two week’s worth of water and food on hand.

The one thing about insanity is that you can’t ever reasonably anticipate its limits. But if whatever lunacy they try is going to effect the supply chain, then it’s going to effect most of us. And based on the first three attempts and the recent firing of the top US military strategist, I have no problem believing that the plan will not achieve its objectives.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika and the Evo-Avengers 008

VD: This is not my response to the two Eco-Avenger videos, this is the portion of the transcript of Will Duffy’s appearance last night on Ms Matthew’s channel when they discussed Probability Zero.

On Reading the Book and Watching the Response

Will: Here are my receipts. I purchased Probability Zero on July 26th and I didn’t read it right away. Then I purchased Hardcoded on August 9th. Then I purchased The Frozen Gene on August 10th. And then I emailed Vox for the first time on August 22nd. So these are the receipts. This is the exact timeline. This was nothing I had in my back pocket. This wasn’t the long game.

As to how I knew so many details about Vox Day, including details about his son—it’s quite simple. I read his books. Everything in my presentation was from his books. Everything.

It will come as a shock to most of you that Erica, Dr. Zack Hancock, Dr. Dan, Dr. Maddie Frank, and Grayson Hawk did not read the Probability Zero book that my presentation was based on. Details forthcoming. I had a lot of homework this go-round. I had to rewatch the last presentation, watch Erica’s rebuttal video to Vox Day, and then watch “Six Scientists Roast Vox Day” for over four hours. These videos were 12 hours, 42 minutes, and 25 seconds long total. My game plan: Step one, rewatch Human Evolution 2 live stream. Step two, meet with Mike Griffiths. Step three, watch Erica’s response video to Vox Day. Step four, meet with Mike Griffiths. Step five, watch “Six Scientists Roast Vox Day.”

For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Mike Griffiths is a mathematician—he’s the head of maths at a private institution in England. He’s a huge fan of Erica, and he’s an atheist.

I want to highlight one comment from Dr. Dan over at Creation Myths: “Can we also just marvel at the fact that Will went to a GD billiards player to learn popgen instead of, I don’t know, a population geneticist?” I’ll let the comment speak for itself.

On the Fossil Record

Will: Erica covered a lot in the last session. She covered fossils, more fossils, and finally more fossils. The more Erica teaches me about the fossil record and the more I learn about it, the more I struggle to make sense of young earth creationism.

I’m not going to elaborate on this now, but I will in January during our final discussion.

Predictions and Tiktaalik

Will: Erica, you said predictions are the gold standard of science. I’ve been thinking about that. Since our series started, I’ve tried to watch every evolution debate on the Modern Day Debate YouTube channel, and the number one evolution prediction that comes up almost every time is Tiktaalik. I’ve heard it so much that I never actually looked into the prediction and just accepted the claim that it was predicted. In the past couple weeks, I decided to look into it and I can’t find any evidence that it was predicted. I’m not making a positive claim that it wasn’t predicted—I’m just saying I can’t find any evidence that it was. So I want to know: in what way was Tiktaalik predicted?

Molecular Clock Discrepancies

Will: Erica, you said that the molecular clock matches with the fossil emergence time. Unfortunately, I have not had time to look into this, but I have been contacted by multiple people who said there are significant discrepancies with reconciling the fossil record with the molecular clock.

I have been sent multiple scientific papers that I haven’t read, and I’ll show them:

  • “The Origin of Animals: Can Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record Be Reconciled?”
  • “Uncertainty in the Timing of Origin of Animals and the Limits of Precision in Molecular Timescales”
  • “Survival and Selection Biases in Early Animal Evolution and a Source of Systematic Overestimation in Molecular Clocks”
  • “Re-evaluating Molecular Clock Maximum Age Calibrations Revives Pre-Ediacaran Divergence Estimates for Animals”

Teleology

Will: When this part of the presentation came up, I mentioned to Erica that I thought what she was saying went against what she said about teleology originally—that we can’t tell if something’s designed.

Here’s what was said in the last presentation: “There is actually a way to use fracture patterns to tell whether or not a tool was made by a hominin or not. You can actually roll a bunch of rocks down a hill and see how they break. So there’s a way to differentiate between something that was designed by hands and something that nature did in the case of stone tools.”

But in our first session, she said: “The problem with teleology is exactly what you see on the screen. We can’t differentiate between the designed and the natural.” And a couple minutes later: “It’s not that teleology is impossible. It’s that teleology is non-scientific because it can’t actually be tested.”

I do struggle to understand that when combined with saying there is a test we can do. I think it’s possible teleology is kind of sneaking back in the door here.

The Selection Coefficient / Selective Turnover Coefficient Error

Will: When Erica and Zach were going over my slide, Erica said that “d” in the formula is “Day’s selection coefficient.” And then she said, “What’s crazy is that Day’s selection coefficient isn’t actually a selection coefficient.”

This is unfortunate. If you go back and look at my slide, it’s a selective turnover coefficient. It is not a selection coefficient. So when you said Day’s selective turnover coefficient cannot do what a selection coefficient does, that was not valid because it’s not a selection coefficient.

Zach was presenting and said, “So Vox has this other term d, but we don’t know what it means.” He admitted that he doesn’t know what it means, which makes sense. Unfortunately, that entire section of the video was a category error, and I didn’t find one person in the thousands of comments who caught this—I could be wrong, but I think it’s because people did not read Probability Zero.

After reading the book, you walk away with a really good understanding of what a selection coefficient is in population genetics, and you would never confuse it with Day’s selective turnover coefficient d. In population genetics, a selection coefficient uses the symbol S, which I actually used in the formula. Selection coefficients are S. The selective turnover coefficient is d.

Who Actually Read the Book

Will: People ask, “How do you know so much about Vox?” I read his books. In the beginning of the second video, Erica said, “So we read his book. Now when I say ‘we,’ I mean me, Zach, and four of our other credentialed friends.” That was a collective “we,” and I think people might have missed what it actually meant. It didn’t mean all of them read the book.

  • Zach said: “It’s like trying to explain to a 5-year-old why the sky is blue. It’s just a waste of time and I’m not going to read your book. I’m not going to waste my time with it. I got science to do.” So Zach didn’t read the book.
  • Maddie said: “I read 40% of a book about this.” So she read less than half.
  • Erica said: “I read about 60 to 70% of the book in its entirety, whereas I skimmed the rest.”

Then something else happened. When Erica’s first video rebuttal to Vox Day came out, the numbers were not the same numbers that I originally presented. They were way off. The quotes and page numbers she was giving were not correct in my book. Come to find out, none of them purchased Probability Zero. They obtained an EPUB version somewhere and shared it with everyone else. It was the wrong version. The only version you can buy—which is what I bought, for $4.99 on Amazon—is the second edition, which had corrections, updates, and the latest science. The EPUB version they all used was the original edition.

Vox Day’s Prediction

Will: Vox Day made a prediction on his blog on September 26th, the day after our last live session: “My response is fairly simple and straightforward. I’ll be happy to talk to her or to whomever and explain these things. I do not expect anyone to actually (a) talk to me or (b) read the book. I don’t know what it is about biologists, population geneticists, and other science enthusiasts, but they always seem to imagine they can effectively critique anything without bothering to actually learn anything about it.”

I was really hoping this prediction would not come true.

Wright-Fisher, Moran, and Day’s Selective Turnover Coefficient

Will: Zach said: “There are two classic models—the Wright-Fisher model and the Moran model. In its classic sense, the Wright-Fisher model does not have overlapping generations. But you can equate the two by setting the population size (the N value) in the Wright-Fisher model to an effective population size and you just scale that effective population size by the slowdown of drift due to overlapping generations. So even the Wright-Fisher model can account for overlapping generations.”

Zach is correct here. But since he didn’t read Probability Zero and doesn’t understand Day’s selective turnover coefficient d, he doesn’t know why it’s still necessary and why it captures something that N-sub-e misses.

Both models—Wright-Fisher and Moran—are answering this question: How fast does genetic drift move neutral alleles through the population?

Day’s selective turnover coefficient d is designed to answer an entirely different question: How fast does the entire gene pool turn over?

The d formula involves variables that simply have not been accounted for in standard population genetic models.

Now, if anyone out there wants to grab my attention and immediately build rapport with me, simply acknowledge and tip your hat to Vox Day for his selective turnover coefficient. It has essentially nothing to do with his Mittens argument that evolution by natural selection is mathematically impossible. So conceding this one should be relatively harmless.

Zach’s Calculation Errors

Will: Zach said, “This is going to be 76.8 multiplied by 252,000, and that’s how many mutations you’re actually going to have in that time period.” This was a mistake. And remember what Erica said—trusted creators are people who can own their mistakes. Zach is a trusted creator. He owned his mistake, and it’s in the video. He corrected himself: “Importantly, we can’t use 6.4—this is the diploid genome size—for the fixation rate, because you fix on a haploid genome. So it should be 3.2.”

This made me happy. But then a few seconds later he said, “I want to quickly clarify that value, but I also want to say that we can still use this value in the following derivations.” He referenced Perubski et al. 2025, saying they estimate an average of 152 de novo mutations every single generation, and dividing that in half for the haploid genome size gives 76—meaning the original number can still be used.

But this is a pretty significant error. The Perubski et al. number includes large structural variants, insertions, deletions, and duplications—not just single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Zach’s entire calculation on the whiteboard is explicitly about single nucleotide differences using a single nucleotide mutation rate. You can’t validate a SNP-only calculation with a number that includes large structural variation.

Once again, I could not find anyone in the thousands of comments who caught this. But you know who did catch it? Mike Griffiths. The billiards player.

The 38 Million Number

Will: Zach says we can fix 38 million differences between humans and chimps. That’s incorrect for three reasons.

First, the calculation is being run on the diploid genome size (76.8) instead of the haploid genome (38.4).

Second, minor: he’s using 252,000 generations instead of the d-coded size of 201,600.

Most importantly: neutral theory applies to the entire genome. Zach is using circular reasoning in assuming the neutral prediction of 35 million differences all fall perfectly into the divergent sites. In reality, the divergent sites are only 1.09% of the genome. So statistically, only 1.09% of the neutral substitutions would end up in the divergent zone. The proper formula would be: 15-some-odd-million × 35 million ÷ 3.2 billion (the size of the genome). So Zach’s original 38 million number is in actuality just 169,344.

Rate vs. Latency: The Highway Analogy

Will: Zach said: “Hopefully you can see a very glaring problem with this math. One is that it assumes that each mutation has to both arise and go to fixation before the next mutation can occur.”

Zach is incorrect here. Part of me has sympathy for him as he’s trying to critique a book he hasn’t read. But the other part of me struggles to have sympathy for the same reason—he’s trying to critique a book he hasn’t read.

When you calculate a rate such as an observed fixation rate, you are dividing the total number of generations observed by the total number of fixations over that period. This tells you how many generations elapsed per fixation on average, regardless of whether those fixations occurred sequentially or overlapped.

Vox Day’s calculation is a rate calculation. Zach thinks it is a latency calculation.

I can help everyone understand with a simple highway analogy. Imagine you were counting how many cars pass a red line in one hour, and you count 360 cars. How would you calculate the average rate? The numerator is the time (3,600 seconds), the denominator is the number of cars (360). So 3,600 ÷ 360 = 10 seconds per car. This is the exact same method Vox Day uses to calculate the average observed fixation rate. If you see this formula and say, “Well, that formula means the cars can only travel one at a time, like through a tunnel,” that is absolutely incorrect.

Vox Day’s calculation is not a latency calculation and is not assuming one fixation happens before another one starts. This was explicitly covered and anticipated in Probability Zero.

I’m not hammering on Zach here. I believe he is a trusted creator and he’s going to own these mistakes. We’re all just trying to get to the truth.

Mittens Is Not the Waiting Time Problem

Will: Dr. Dan says, “Like the waiting time problem, which—even though Vox Day has never heard of it—that’s the argument he’s making.” No. Mittens is not the waiting time problem. The waiting time problem refers to the significant amount of time required for beneficial genetic mutations to occur in a population. The Mittens argument isn’t concerned with mutation rates at all. It is an empirical audit of observable fixations. Mittens would be better referred to as the fixation problem.

The Bacteria Issue

Will: Dr. Maddie said the idea of applying the fixation rate from bacteria to human populations doesn’t work when you just take the average of the fixations out of the Lenski experiment and apply that as a fixation rate to the human population assuming all the mutations are happening in series.

No, it doesn’t assume mutations are happening in series. But let’s talk about the bacteria issue. I don’t know anyone who argues that humans fixate mutations faster than bacteria in terms of generations per fixation. I think it’s possible the audience walked away from that video thinking that is what was being argued. So I’m hoping Erica and the others can clarify whether or not they actually believe humans fixate mutations faster than bacteria.

Zach said something good: “The issue with using even conceptually the Lenski long-term evolution experiment for a fixation rate is that the Lenski long-term experiment begins with a bacterial population that is clonal and has no diversity.” Zach makes a really valid point here. This was also caught by Mike Griffiths, who brought it to my attention before this video was released.

Here’s Vox Day’s response, which I’m not claiming to understand:

“The polymorphism objection sounds legitimate until you think about what standing variation is. It’s not a warehouse of pre-adapted beneficial alleles waiting for their moment. It’s mostly neutral variation, which is why it’s still segregating. If those variants were beneficial, they’d have already swept to fixation. If they were deleterious, purifying selection would have removed them. What mutation-drift equilibrium gives you is a population full of genetic noise at low frequencies, not a head start on adaptation.”

I don’t understand this enough yet to know who’s right. But the main argument with the bacteria thing seems to be that Vox shouldn’t apply bacterial fixation rates to humans because bacteria are clonal and slow.

Dr. Michael Lynch—who I’m told is one of the most respected population geneticists in the field—has stated that bacteria are actually faster and more efficient at molecular adaptation than eukaryotes because of their population size advantage. He says: “Prokaryotes appear to be much more efficient than eukaryotes at promoting simple to moderately complex molecular adaptations.”

Mike Griffiths as Intermediary

Will: Mike Griffiths watched Erica and Zach’s presentation. He also bought Probability Zero. He watched Erica and Zach’s presentation twice and has a list of about a half-dozen questions and issues. I introduced Mike to Zach via email and Mike shared his list with Zach. Zach has yet to respond.

On the Probability Zero side, Mike has started reading Probability Zero and Vox Day’s scientific papers. He has a list of questions and issues for Vox as well. I asked Vox if he would respond to Mike, and he agreed. The three of us did a Zoom together last week, and after the Zoom, Mike sent his list to Vox.

I told Erica already that I do not rush things like this. I spent a very significant amount of time not only learning Vox Day’s arguments in Probability Zero, but also learning as much as I could about the math behind population genetics. I have since spent a good deal of time reviewing the responses from Erica, Zach, Dan, Maddie, and Grayson. There are significant errors that I trust will be owned and corrected. As such, the verdict is still out.

I will tell everyone I’m relying heavily on Mike Griffiths as well. I’m honestly giddy to get to be a bystander on his conversations with both Zach Hancock and Vox Day. Mike has legitimate concerns for both of them, and I’m extremely curious how they will both respond.

Will’s Conclusion

Will: I want to point out to everyone what stood out to me most the last few weeks after I mentioned Vox Day and Probability Zero.

The response I received was the exact opposite of what everyone has been telling me to do from the very beginning:

  • I’ve been told to focus on the data and science and not the person. Yet the vast majority of responses and comments I get are focused on Vox Day as a person and not the data and the science.
  • I’ve been told that Darwin’s racism has no relevance to evolution and that Fisher—of the Wright-Fisher model—being a eugenicist doesn’t make his math wrong. But that’s all I’m hearing about Vox Day.
  • I’ve been told to focus on understanding new things instead of just trying to refute them. But I see very few people trying to actually understand his arguments—just trying to refute them.
  • I’ve been told not to run to creationists hoping they can refute what Erica teaches me and to study what I’m taught. But all I’ve seen is everyone say, “I’m just gonna have Erica and Zach and whoever else refute this instead of looking into it.”

I think it’s important for what it’s worth to know what I’m experiencing and what I’m seeing from my perspective.

Erica’s Response

Erica: I have a lot of thoughts—like three pages of thoughts. I’m going to work through some of them, but I’m not going to get to everything because you have a hard stop at 7:00 and I want to get to the actual presentation and super chats.

I can understand your perspective on being frustrated with people’s response to Vox. I said this to you via email and I’ve voiced this to other people as well. I think you have to put yourself in other people’s shoes a little bit too, though. The reason Zach and I covered what we covered in that initial video is because that’s what you shared—that was in your PowerPoint. Our first video was obviously just in response to the PowerPoint we got from you. We didn’t have access to the book at that point. I hadn’t read the book at that time either, even the scant portion I did read, although I did read Mittens 3.0, which is available online for free and is supposed to be—according to Vox—the most up-to-date version of the argument. That’s also why in the second video we went over Mittens 3.0 in addition to the first version of Probability Zero, because that was according to him the strongest version of the argument.

I can understand your frustration, but I find it difficult to set aside a lot of his other beliefs in the same way one would for someone like Darwin or Fisher. In Darwin and Fisher’s case—and I said this to you via email—Fischer was a eugenicist and Darwin was racist. That’s factually true. Darwin was an abolitionist as well—he was progressive for his time—but that doesn’t change the fact that he lived within the context he lived in. But the work they did in science did stand on its own. Their work has stood the test of time, and Fisher and Darwin’s ideas are still being used today to make accurate predictions. I’ve not seen the same with Vox’s math.

This is something that people sympathetic to Vox have not appreciated, and I’ve yet to see him comment on it. The math that underpins standard population genetics has been used to accurately model real populations now. And there are like a billion of them, which is why I showed a slideshow of two dozen or however many it was. Point blank, full stop: if Vox is correct and traditional population genetics is incorrect, those papers shouldn’t exist. They shouldn’t be able to accurately model or even predict changes in real world populations.

I do still maintain that this is a waiting time problem. The waiting time problem in traditional creationist circles is a fixation problem. Mutation rate and fixation rate are used interchangeably a lot, inappropriately, as you would now know because you’ve read up on a lot of population genetics. But because they’re used interchangeably, it makes it seem like the waiting time problem is something distinct from this fixation problem. It’s not. You can go back to Doug Axe’s original paper in the early 2000s and see exactly this, which is why we’ve said this is a waiting time problem.

I’ll say too: the idea that he’s using the Lenski long-term evolution bacteria—which, as you accurately pointed out, are clonal and thus inappropriate for that reason—I don’t think anybody’s saying that bacteria quite literally fixate faster than humans do. That’s not my understanding. The problem is that in the Lenski experiment in particular, by their nature of beginning clonally and by their nature of not recombining, these two things are not analogous. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The numbers exist out there for eukaryotes—fruit flies, rats, humans. We have pedigree studies on real-world human populations: a grandparent, a parent, and their kid. And you can use that to model these populations into the past. They don’t match Vox’s math. And they don’t behave like bacteria.

To me, what rings out most severely is that he must rectify this math with the entire scientific community, and he won’t. I find that incredibly frustrating because he puts out the books and says, “This stands on its own,” but it’s never applied to any real-world populations.

I have to ask you this. I don’t understand how you could give him the benefit of the doubt for the other stuff. I can sit here and say I disavow Darwin for the shitty stuff he said. I disavow Fisher for the shitty stuff he said. I like their math, but I can recognize that in these areas, they’re bad people for holding these perspectives. And you’ve already said—just to be clear for everyone—Will said he disavows white supremacy and doesn’t think women should lose the right to vote and doesn’t think marital rape laws should be revoked. He said that up top. But I still think you’re being a little bit defensive of Vox, and I don’t understand how you could do that after watching the video that had a lot of this stuff in his own words. That’s confusing to me. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here because I think this series is a good thing.

DISCUSS ON SG