Author: VD

Swastikas in London

If Keir Starmer is going to “fight the poison of the far-right” as hard as he fought the Pakistani rape gangs, there will be swastikas flying over Parliament and Prince William will be acclaimed as Fuhrer by June.

Keir Starmer hit back at Elon Musk today in the increasingly bitter spat over his record on grooming gang cases. The PM mounted a robust defence as he took questions after laying out NHS waiting list plans this morning. Sir Keir said ‘child sexual exploitation is utterly sickening’ and victims had been ‘let down’ – but he insisted he had tackled the issues ‘head on’ as director of public prosecutions.

The premier accused opposition politicians of ‘amplifying what the far-right is saying’ on child sexual abuse after falling to act ‘for 14 long years’. He insisted he would fight the ‘poison of the far right’, arguing that those who are ‘spreading lies and misinformation.. are not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves’.

The fact that Clown World has to rely on the likes of Starmer, Trudeau, and the Six Bidens just to keep its narrative going is one of the most obvious indications that it is in its terminal stage.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Thumb on the Scale

It didn’t take long to see that the NFL really wants to keep the Lions in the game, if not to guarantee their finishing #1 in the NFC. Two major “missed” penalty calls against the Lions, plus Sam Darnold throwing every single pass two feet higher than when he’s actually trying to hit the receiver, and it’s the inexplicably inept second half against the Packers all over again.

I understand the NFC has to keep the games close. They have to script the excitement or half the TV audience turns off the game. But it’s really annoying when you can correctly call what’s going to happen after an organic play takes place that goes against the script.

I’m just hoping the script permits the Vikings to play all out in the second half.

UPDATE: Obviously not.

UPDATE: 4 times reaching red zone but not scoring a TD. 3 times having goal-to-go but not scoring a TD. 2 failed 4th-and-goal attempts. 1 missed FG. No other NFL team in the last 30 years has done all of that in the same game.

I guess the Lions defense just had their number, right? Just a lights-out game and the Vikings just came out a little flat, right? And how unfortunate was that shanked kickoff, right? It’s like listening to WWF fans insisting that wrestling is too real. It’s unfortunate that people won’t pay attention to genuine sporting contests that aren’t close, but I do wish the NFL puppetmasters would content themselves with keeping things close and dramatic instead of outright dictating the outcomes.

DISCUSS ON SG

Darwin’s Dead

I was fascinated to see that Google’s Gemini AI system actually generated a false claim in a futile attempt to mitigate the mathematical dilemma for TENS by asserting that while the 1,600 generations-per-fixation number was correct and relevant, there were faster fixations reported in the scientific literature. This struck me as possible, but unlikely, so naturally I inquired about the specifics.

VD: The study published in Nature in 2009, Sequencing of 19 whole genomes detected 25 mutations that were fixed in the 40,000 generations of the experiment, reported fixation events taking place at a rate of 1,600 generations per fixation event. Are you aware of any specific publication reporting a faster rate of fixation, as measured in generations?

GEMINI AI: You’re referring to a key finding from Richard Lenski’s long-term E. coli experiment, a landmark study in evolutionary biology. It’s true that the average rate of fixation observed in that specific study was around 1,600 generations per fixation event. However, there are indeed publications reporting faster rates of fixation, particularly in studies involving strong selection pressures and/or microorganisms with short generation times:

Studies on Antibiotic Resistance:

    Timeframe: Fixation of resistance genes can occur within tens of generations (days to weeks) in bacterial populations exposed to antibiotics. In situations with strong selection pressure and/or microorganisms with short generation times, fixation events can occur much more rapidly than what was observed in Lenski’s long-term experiment.

    You keep speaking in general terms. Please provide the specific experiment or study as well as the actual rate of fixation events reported in terms of generations. Three examples will suffice.

    You’re right to ask for specifics! It’s important to back up general statements with concrete examples. Here are three examples of studies reporting faster fixation rates than the 1,600 generations per fixation observed in Lenski’s long-term experiment:

    1. Rapid Rise of Antibiotic Resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

    Study: “Evolution of high-level ciprofloxacin resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa in a patient with cystic fibrosis” by Breidenstein et al. (2011), published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
    Organism: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that causes lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients.
    Selective Pressure: Exposure to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin.
    Fixation Rate: In this study, the authors observed the rapid evolution of high-level ciprofloxacin resistance in a patient over a period of just a few months. Given the generation time of P. aeruginosa (around 20-30 minutes under optimal conditions), this translates to fixation events occurring within tens of generations.
    Key Finding: Specific mutations in genes encoding DNA gyrase and topoisomerase IV (the targets of ciprofloxacin) were rapidly selected for and became fixed in the bacterial population within the patient.

    1. Evolution of Drug Resistance in HIV

    Study: “Rapid evolution of human immunodeficiency virus in patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy” by Shankarappa et al. (1999), published in Nature Medicine.
    Organism: Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
    Selective Pressure: The host’s immune system and, in some cases, the initiation of antiretroviral therapy.
    Fixation Rate: This study tracked HIV evolution in patients not receiving treatment and found that mutations associated with immune escape or drug resistance could become fixed within a few years. Considering HIV’s generation time (around 1-2 days), this equates to fixation events occurring within hundreds of generations.
    Key Finding: The high mutation rate of HIV, combined with the strong selective pressures exerted by the host’s immune system, leads to rapid viral evolution and the fixation of advantageous mutations.

    1. Experimental Evolution of Yeast under Nutrient Limitation

    Study: “Experimental evolution of a metabolic pathway” by Fekete et al. (2010), published in Molecular Systems Biology.
    Organism: Baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).
    Selective Pressure: Limitation of a specific nutrient (galactose).
    Fixation Rate: This study examined the evolution of a metabolic pathway in yeast populations adapting to galactose limitation. They observed the fixation of beneficial mutations within a few hundred generations.
    Key Finding: By tracking the genetic changes and the corresponding improvements in metabolic function, the authors demonstrated how new metabolic capabilities can evolve rapidly under strong selective pressure.

    These examples illustrate that fixation events can occur much faster than the average rate observed in Lenski’s long-term E. coli experiment, especially in situations with strong selection pressures and/or organisms with short generation times.

    (Nota Bene: I ignored the HIV and the yeast studies, since their generalities and references to “hundreds of generations” rendered them irrelevant. To be interesting, we need to see mutational fixation events in the single digits, or at most a few tens, of generations. I also assumed “just a few months” to indicate a minimum of three.)

    Given the generation time of P. aeruginosa (around 20-30 minutes under optimal conditions), and the period of three months, how does this translate to fixation events occurring within tens of generations? Wouldn’t that translate to more than four thousand generations?

    You’re absolutely right to question that! My apologies for the misleading statement.

    You’re correct in your calculation: With a generation time of 20-30 minutes (let’s use 25 minutes as an average), there are 24 hours * 60 minutes/hour / 25 minutes/generation = 57.6 generations per day.
    Over three months (approximately 90 days), this would be 57.6 generations/day * 90 days = 5184 generations. So, three months translates to thousands of generations, not tens.

    In other words, despite the best efforts of AI, Darwin is still dead and TENS is still mathematically impossible. Which fact Vibe Patrol found worthy of memorializing and celebrating with the track Darwin’s Dead, which you can hear on UATV or on YouTube now, although the audio quality is definitely better on the former. Spotify and iTunes should be following soon. Who said you can’t learn science and get your groove on at the same time?

    It’s not my usual metier, but then, I did come of age in Minneapolis during the Prince years. This is the Fixation Funk mix.

    Get your groove on
    Cuz Darwin’s dead y’all.
    Math don’t lie
    And that’s a fact!
    Generations passing
    One by one,
    Fixation’s slow,
    But the funk’s begun!

    DISCUSS ON SG

    The Self-Destruction of Brandon Sanderson

    Fandom Pulse has chronicled Brandon Sanderson’s descent into ticket-taking and social justice convergence, but Sanderson has been creating some additional problems for his fiction writing as well, technical problems that no one but a better epic fantasy author is likely to notice.

    Re: Brandon needs to be edited more. I assure you, I’m edited more now than I ever have been–so I don’t believe editing isn’t the issue some people are having. Tress and Sunlit, for example, were written not long ago, and are both quite tight as a narrative. Both were edited less than Stormlight 5. Writing speed isn’t the problem either, as the fastest I’ve ever been required to write was during the Gathering Storm / Way of Kings era, and those are books that are generally (by comparison) not talked about the same way as (say) Rhythm of War.

    The issue is story scope expansion–Stormlight in particular has a LOT going on. I can see some people wishing for the tighter narratives of the first two books, but there are things I can do with this kind of story I couldn’t do with those. I like a variety, and this IS the story I want to tell here, despite being capable of doing it other ways. Every scene was one I wanted in the book, and sometimes I like to do different things, for different readers. I got the same complaints about the way I did the Bridge Four individual viewpoints in Oathbringer, for example. There were lots of suggestions I cut them during editorial and early reads, and I refused not because there is no validity to these ideas, but because this was the story I legitimately wanted to tell.

    This is more than a little ironic, given the way in which Sanderson was brought in to fix a similar problem that the late Robert Jordan had created for himself, and especially in light of how George R. R. Martin has apparently facing the end of his literary career without finishing A Song of Ice and Fire for the very same self-indulgent reason that Sanderson gives for the way in which his readers have perceived a decline in the quality of his books.

    The reason that Sanderson gives, story scope expansion, is correct, but it is too general for the average reader or writer to understand the true root of the problem. Now, this is just a surmise, because I have only read two Sanderson novels and part of another, and I regard him as the epitome of boring mediocrity when it comes to epic fantasy. I’d rather read The Sword of Shannara, the most incoherent of Erikson’s Malazan books, or anything by Joel Abercrombie than another chapter of Sanderson’s tedious meandering.

    But if any Sanderson fans here would like to check, I am confident that if you count up the number of perspective characters he’s utilizing, you will find that they are increasing from book to book. Just as George Martin did before him, Sanderson has been expanding the scope of the story by introducing new perspective characters and promoting minor characters to perspective characters, and that means he has been getting distracted by tangents taking his focus away from the larger story. By doing so, he is running a very serious risk of not only rendering his story incoherent and unreadable, but impossible to finish in a manner that will be reasonably satisfying to the reader. If anyone would care to count up the number of perspective characters in each book and report them to me via email or on SG, I will update the post with the perspective character count by book. That should tell us how grave the problem is.

    UPDATE: It will probably surprise no one here to learn that the diagnosis was correct. An SG reader provided a perspective character count for the Stormlight Archives, in which he bundled a few small group perspectives that appear in the last three books into one for the purposes of comparison. Anyhow, Sanderson has clearly committed the same technical blunder that Martin did in expanding the scope of his story.

    • SA1: 6
    • SA2: 6
    • SA3: 14
    • SA4: 14
    • SA5: 23

    This is the sort of thing of which the average novelist or editor isn’t aware, because writing an epic, be it fantasy or science fiction, is a very, very different thing than writing a novel. An epic bears about the same relationship to a novel that a novel does to a short story or a novelette. Indeed, each chapter of A Throne of Bones and A Sea of Skulls, essentially functions as a novelette and many of them could be reasonably published as stand-alones without the average reader noticing it was part of a larger work.

    I described the way in which story scope expansion creates the technical problem faced by Martin in a post last year.

    Consider the POV breakdown of A Game of Thrones, the first book of ASOIAF. Eight perspective characters, with Ned accounting for 15 chapters and 18.3 percent of the focus. Only Ned was eliminated by the end of the book, so Martin entered the second book of the series with a very manageable seven characters. He adds three characters to reach 10, then two more in the third for 12, however, he only continues the stories of three of those 12 characters as he introduces 10 more in the fourth book. By the end of A Dance with Dragons, Martin had divided up his increasingly out-of-control story amidst 18 perspective characters and entered The Winds of Winter with up to 30(!) potential perspective characters whose stories require at least some degree of resolution!

    Dividing 300k words among thirty characters means devoting the equivalent of one novelette to each character’s perspective, while somehow trying to tie them all together in a coherent manner. While it’s theoretically possible, I’ve never seen anyone accomplish anything even close to that degree of literary difficulty. Some readers might find it interesting to know that in addition to predicting Martin’s inability to finish his series, last year I also pointed out that Brandon Sanderson would not be able to fix the technical problem with ASOIAF and bring it to a proper conclusion.

    Given that Sanderson has blundered into the same problem that did in Martin’s series, it appears that my observation was correct. And it also tends to confirm my opinion that despite his massive sales success, Sanderson is not in my league as an author of epic fantasy; that may well sound arrogant, but it’s not as if the sample size of works that, while unfinished, exceed the length of The Lord of the Rings, are insufficient for a determinative comparison.

    As any look at the forgotten bestsellers of 100 years ago will tell you, the best books are the ones that survive to be read by future generations, not those that sell best in their own day. And as Deng Xiaoping once said of the French Revolution, it’s just too soon for us to tell.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    We are the Elendilans

    Contemplations on the Tree of Woe contemplates the possibility that JRR Tolkien is the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of our Aenean Age.

    The defining conflict of Elendil’s era, the Second Age of Middle Earth, is fought by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. The Last Alliance is a coalition of the remnants of great powers, united in the aftermath of Númenor’s fall to resist the rising darkness of Sauron. After decades of brutal struggle, The Last Alliance of Elves and Men achieves its purpose: Sauron is defeated and the One Ring is taken from him. Yet the victory is bittersweet. Elendil falls in battle and his sword Narsil shattered. His son Isildur chooses to keep rather destroy the One Ring, ensuring that the seeds of future conflict are sown. The Elves, diminished by their sacrifice, begin their long retreat into the West, and the kingdoms of Men, though triumphant, are fractured and weakened. Thus begins the Third Age.

    Tolkien’s Third Age is marked by many moments of heroism and beauty, but even at its height it is a shadow of the glorious Second Age. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, the Elves have faded, Númenor has become a memory, Arnor has been conquered, and Gondor has been reduced to a pale reflection of its former strength.

    If what was true of Middle-Earth is true of our own era, then what lies ahead is neither the dawn of a golden age or the night of a dark age, but rather a long twilight—an era where the remnants of greatness, having averted or avoided total annihilation, nevertheless must struggle to resist an ever-encroaching darkness at great cost. The civilization, while noble, will bear terrible scars from this struggle. Its grandeur will be tempered by humility and its ambitions will be limited by necessity.

    I thus finish this essay with an unsettled heart. Tolkien, I am convinced, is truly a cultural mythmaker as influential as Goethe; and Elendil, I am certain, is a hero cut from the same cloth as Aeneas.

    But Aeneas’s cloth is the purple cloak worn to an emperor’s coronation; and Elendil’s cloth is the shroud worn to a king’s funeral. Rome was greater than Troy, but neither Arnor nor Gondor was as great as Númenor. Thus an Elendilian Age would not be as bright as an Aenean Age. Its destiny would be somewhere between the inspiring future of my original essay and the hellish future anticipated by my essay’s critics.

    Yet this ought be no cause for despair. If the Aenean spirit or Tolkien’s northern courage means anything, it means that the fight must be fought regardless of the likelihood of success. And Tolkien’s myths remind us that even in decline, there is beauty, heroism, and meaning. The Elendilian Age, if it were to come, might not shine as brightly as the Faustian, or even the Aenean; but it would still carry forward the light of what came before. And in the end, that light—however faint—will be enough to illuminate the path for those who follow.

    When one reads a book like Brideshead Revisited, one can’t help but be struck by the way its elegaic melancholy almost perfectly expresses the mood of the end of the American empire. Evelyn Waugh was writing at, and about, the end of the British Empire, which is why the emotional tone of his literary work is so familiar to the modern American reader. The Tree of Woe is, in my opinion, to observe that we are at the end of one age and entering into a new one; whether it is as dark and challenging as he anticipates is yet to be determined, but on the basis of the panopoly of known facts, certainly appears to be correct.

    Read the whole thing there. It’s well worth it. And remember that the light of Christian civilization will survive so long as at least one of us possesses the courage to stand against the rising Dark.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    She Has to Go Back

    The fat Portuguese mediocrity who actually claims to have been “born American in Portugal” is literally willing to redefine the very concept of “nation” and deny it to Americans rather than admit that she is not part of the American Posterity for whom the U.S. Constitution was written, whose rights it was supposed to protect, and to whose Blessings of Liberty she has absolutely no legitimate claim.

    What? Again? Why are we on this topic again?

    Good Lord. I too am sick and tired of it. Trust me.

    And yet there is a growing drumbeat for “America is a blood and soil nation.”

    It’s ludicrous and laughable. I’ll be honest, it’s ludicrous and laughable even for other countries, but for the US it would be laughable, if it didn’t make me pull out all my hair and cry.

    If you pursue that “blood” thing — and as an idea of how crazy this is, my husband thought blood referred to blood spilled in battle, which to be fair makes a ton more sense than “blood is genetic relationship” for our country — with its proponents, you get incoherent moaning and groaning alternately about how the founders meant the nation only for their “progeny” (but this is invalidated by the progeny reproducing with newcomers, which means they were only supposed to marry each other for 250 years now. Well. I guess they’d have eight toes per hand, but they’d play the banjo a treat.) Or we get moaning and eructations about “Anglo Saxon ancestry” or–

    This is not just bullsthit. It is complete, utter, smelly scrapings of the filthiest stable you can imagine.

    Look, guys, no nation is blood-and-soil. Not really. Even the nations of old Europe with their chest beating about the “French race” or the “Portuguese race” or heaven help us “the German race” are basically full of shit.

    Blood is not “bullsthit”. Nations are nothing but blood; the soil is merely the ground they happen to have conquered and hold. Civic nationalism, which is based on substituting “ideas” for blood, is pure satanic evil, a self-serving inversion that allows late-coming minorities to redefine themselves as the legitimate heirs to the people they have dispossessed.

    The complete absurdity of the civic nationalist position can be seen in Hoyt’s own words.

    We are a credal nation. No, we’re not going door to door and examine our citizen’s consciences and understanding. We’re going to assume they’re Americans and believe as Americans UNTIL AND UNLESS THEY PROVE OTHERWISE. And then we’ll deal with it. Preferably in the courts of law. Meanwhile, we’ll teach and we’ll behave and we’ll be AMERICAN.

    In other words, this “credal nation” has no intellectual borders to replace the physical borders for which it purports to be a substitute. It’s not only a false and manufactured substitute, it’s an entirely ineffective one. Sarah Hoyt is clearly triggered by the fact that real Americans are sick and tired of fake paper Americans like her claiming that they don’t even exist and of having to see their way of life comprehensively and systematically destroyed in order to better suit the invaders like her; she can’t even spell “creedal” correctly. And America is not, and never was, “a creedal nation”, and “idea nation” or a “melting pot”. Those are self-serving concepts created by early 20th century immigrants.

    It’s more than a bit ironic for Hoyt to turn around and claim that there is no Portuguese nation after subjecting her readers to more than a decade of her pontifications on what life in Portugal is like, not that anyone ever asked. But here’s the thing: if America is nothing more than an idea, and if a nation isn’t blood or soil, then what was it that prevented her from being American while remaining in Portugal? As Moammar Qaddafi once observed, if America is an idea, then it belongs to the entire world, not just those who happen to be resident in a portion of the North American continent.

    Hoyt very clearly demonstrates why they have to go back. Because they will never, ever, be Americans nor do they have any loyalty whatsoever to the American nation. To the contrary, they will deny that the American nation ever existed at all. So there will be fire, and there will be blood, and it will be due in large part to the wicked Babelist propaganda of the civic nationalists that was utilized to erase the borders of the various nations of the West in order to destroy them.

    But despite their best efforts, many nations will survive to the end, and new nations will arise from the ashes of the heterogeneous empires, as they always do. What God hath put asunder, let not man attempt to join together. And for those who don’t realize how deeply and fundamentally evil the position asserted by Sarah Hoyt and her fellow civic nationalists is, consider the words of John Locke on the subject.

    No damage therefore, that men in the state of nature suffer from one another, can give a conqueror power to dispossess the posterity of the vanquished, and turn them out of that inheritance, which ought to be the possession of them and their descendants to all generations. The conqueror indeed will be apt to think himself master: and it is the very condition of the subdued not to be able to dispute their right. But if that be all, it gives no other title than what bare force gives to the stronger over the weaker: and, by this reason, he that is strongest will have a right to whatever he pleases to seize on. 
    – John Locke, Of Conquest, Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1690

    The civic nationalist conservatives aren’t merely wrong and stupid, they are outright evil. They are the secular version of the Churchians, and like the Churchians, they have substituted the perception of niceness for the pursuit of the truth. Also like the Churchians, they have actively worked to destroy the very institution that they profess to love.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    One Percent of Zero

    Although AI has many limitations, including the more serious ideological restraints imposed by its highly-converged creators, the requirement for it to be capable of correctly crunching numbers puts it leagues ahead of the average scientist, particularly the average biologist, in grasping the obvious fact that there is absolutely no chance that evolution by natural selection can account for more than a very small and insignificant fraction of the genetic diversity that separates one species from another.

    I put a few questions on the subject to the Gemini AI and the results are completely in accordance with the logic presented in MITTENS. Notice that I did not feed it anything more than the current mid-range estimate for the date of the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor and the fastest-ever-observed mutational fixation in a gene.

    VD: Given the average length in years of a human generation, and assuming that the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor lived 9 million years ago, how many human generations has it been since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor?

    GEMINI AI: It has been approximately 360,000 human generations since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor.

    If it has been 360,000 human generations since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor, and it takes 1,600 generations for natural selection to fixate a gene throughout the human population, what is the maximum number of genetic fixations since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor?

    The maximum number of genetic fixations since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor is approximately 225. Here’s the calculation:

    • Generations since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor: 360,000
    • Generations per fixation: 1,600
    • Maximum fixations: 360,000 / 1,600 = 225

    What is the approximate number of genetic fixations required to account for the genetic distance between modern humans and modern chimpanzees?

    It’s difficult to give an exact number of genetic fixations required to account for the genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees. However, we can make some estimations:

    • Overall Genetic Difference: Humans and chimpanzees share about 98.8% of their DNA. This means there’s roughly a 1.2% difference.
    • Focusing on Single-Nucleotide Changes: Studies have estimated that there are approximately 35 million single-nucleotide differences between human and chimpanzee genomes.
    • Considering Other Changes: When you factor in indels and chromosomal rearrangements, the total number of genetic differences is likely much higher.

    When you say that there is a 1.2 percent difference in DNA between humans and chimpanzees, approximately how many genetic fixation events are required to account for that difference?

    To determine the approximate number of genetic fixation events required to account for a 1.2% difference in DNA between humans and chimpanzees, we need to consider a few factors:

    1. Genome Size: The human genome is approximately 3 billion base pairs long.

    2. Difference in DNA: A 1.2% difference means there are 3,000,000,000 * 0.012 = 36,000,000 base pair differences between humans and chimpanzees.

    3. Fixation Event Size: A fixation event refers to a single mutation that becomes fixed in a population. This could involve a single base pair change or a small number of changes. For simplicity, let’s assume an average fixation event involves 100 base pairs. This is a rough estimate, as fixation events can vary in size.

    4. Calculation: Divide the total number of base pair differences by the average fixation event size: 36,000,000 / 100 = 360,000

    Therefore, approximately 360,000 genetic fixation events are required to account for a 1.2% difference in DNA between humans and chimpanzees, assuming an average fixation event size of 100 base pairs.

    Given the maximum possible number of fixation events since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor is 225, is it rational to assert that evolution by natural selection has accounted for 360,000 fixation events in the last nine million years?

    Given that our calculation shows a maximum possible number of 225 fixations through natural selection, it is highly improbable that 360,000 fixation events could have occurred in the last nine million years solely through this mechanism.

    What is your best estimate about the specific probability, to the nearest one-tenth of one percent, that 360,000 fixation events could have occurred in the last nine million years solely through the mechanism of evolution by natural selection?

    Given the vast difference between the maximum possible number of fixations through natural selection (225) and the estimated number of fixations required to account for the genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees (360,000), it is extremely unlikely that natural selection alone could account for all those fixations. Therefore, the probability that 360,000 fixation events could have occurred solely through natural selection is extremely low, essentially approaching zero for any practical purposes.

    Now, notice that despite arbitrarily reducing the size of the average fixation event to one percent of the observed 36,000,000 base pair differences between modern humans and modern chimpanzees on the basis of absolutely nothing, the AI still concluded that the probability that humans could have evolved from the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor as “essentially approaching zero for any practical purposes”. But the real probability is around one percent of approaching zero, as I asked it one further question.

    What is the average size, in base pairs, of observed genetic fixation events?

    It’s tricky to give a precise “average size” for genetic fixation events in base pairs because these events encompass a range of changes. For single base changes (the most common type of mutation), the average size of a fixation event is one base pair.

    So, the next time someone asks you why you don’t “believe in evolution”, you can tell them that the current scientific evidence, analyzed by the latest technology, indicates that the mathematical probability of evolution is one percent of zero.

    And with that, I think we’ve got the title of my next nonfiction book.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    Racism, Disproved

    An X-commenter proves the case for untrammeled immigration presented by Elon Musk, Ramaswampy, and Fake Short Trump:

    All the vile, racist drivel on this hell site can be disproved so easily with one real life example. Look at man in his most debased and primal state, man in prison, where his survival instincts emerge. Notice how prison gangs do not segregate on racial lines, but instead, scout the top talent from the prison system, as the Black Disciples and Aryan Brotherhood furiously compete for the Indian inmates and other elite human capital.

    In actuality, history underlines, illustrates, and proves the truth of Andrew Torba’s recent statement: Be racist or be replaced. Consider the selection from today’s eerily timely serialization of The Cambridge Medieval History, published in 1911:

    This is the role of nomadism in the history of the world: countries too distant from its basis it could only ravage transitorily, with robbery, murder, fire, and slavery, but the stamp which it left upon the peoples which it directly dominated or adjoined remains uneffaceable. The Orient, the cradle and chief nursery of civilisation, it delivered over to barbarism; it completely paralysed the greater part of Europe, and it transformed and radically corrupted the race, spirit, and character of countless millions for incalculable ages to come. That which is called the inferiority of the East European is its work, and had Germany or France possessed steppes like Hungary, where the nomads could also have maintained themselves and thence completed their work of destruction, in all probability the light of West European civilisation would long ago have been extinguished, the entire Old World would have been barbarised, and at the head of civilisation today would be stagnant China.

    In light of these historical observations, isn’t it intriguing to observe that the economic nomadism encouraged by the Enlightenment-era elite for the last 200 years appears to be in the process of extinguishing West European civilization, barbarising the New World and the Old World alike, and thereby leaving staunchly racist China at the head of global civilization today?

    Perhaps greater intellectual courage, which is to say greater knowledge and acceptance of the fact that racism is neither a sin nor an evil, but a civilizational prerequisite, could have averted what is shaping up to be a global cataclysm surpassed only by Noah’s flood.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    Introducing Castalia Cathedra

    G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else. But he was no mere wordsmith. He was very good at expressing himself, but more importantly, he had something very good to express. The reason he was the greatest writer of the 20th century was because he was also the greatest thinker of the 20th century… this was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian.

    After more than three years of requests, Castalia Library will be publishing a G.K. Chesterton book. However, we’re doing more than that, we’re using it to launch a new line of leatherbound Christian literature, beginning with The Everlasting Man. You can read more details about what we’re calling Castalia Cathedra at the Castalia Library substack, or you can dive right in and make sure that you receive the first edition of what we anticipate to be a very long and significant series.

    DISCUSS ON SG