Author: VD

Neo-Darwinism is dead

Some of you will recall that I thoroughly, and in some detail, demonstrated the way in which, according to the present scientific understanding of astrophysics, genetic biology, and mathematics, the modern Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the theory of evolution by (mostly) natural selection is impossible, caught as it is between the Scylla of a fixed amount of time and the Charybdis of the number of fixed mutations required to take place in the evolution between one historical species and a present species.

To put it in the most simple terms that even a biologist should be able to follow, if we are told that a football team has gained 1,500 yards on the ground while averaging three yards per rushing play, and we know that the maximum number of offensive plays per team per game is 84, then we know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the yards reported were not gained in a single 60-minute game. They could not have been. It is impossible.

The math is inexorable. The maximum number of yards that could have been gained on the ground in a single game, given a three yards-per-carry average, is 252. It does not matter if a desperate proponent of Neo-Schembechlerism proposes the idea that perhaps the team ran a hurry-up wishbone offense, or that the quarterback was a dual-threat as a runner, or that the team played in a league known for its terrible run defenses, or that one of the halfbacks is known to have one ripped off a 99-yard gain, or that NCAA teams have been known to play up to seven overtime periods, or that up to five different players touched the ball on the same play. The math is inexorable. The assertion that a football team which averages three yards per carry gained 1,500 yards on the ground in a single game is flat-out impossible. We can say with absolute certainty that it never happened without knowing any details whatsoever about the team or the game.

In like manner, the number of fixed mutations that are presently observed to distinguish two species, whether we contemplate modern Man and the Chimpanzee–Human last common ancestor (CHLCA) or the dog and one of the therapsids, are considerably – CONSIDERABLY – in excess of the maximum amount of time that could have passed since the speciation process is believed to have begun. There is only one defense against this straightforward mathematical observation, and that is the idea that enough parallel mutations happened very, very quickly to significantly reduce the average time per fixed mutation to permit it to happen in the intervening time period.

The problem here, of course, is that the numerical gap that needs to be filled is so large that if that were the case, then these mutations would be have to be happening so rapidly, and fixing in parallel so quickly, that we could observe evolution by natural selection happening in real time all the time.

But we don’t.

And, as predicted, the new advances in genetic science combined with new archeobiological discoveries are methodically reducing the already insufficient time in which evolution had to go from point A to point Z.

  • Peştera Muierii woman is related to Europeans, but she is not a direct ancestor
  • Reduced diversity in Europe caused by Last Glaciation, not out-of-Africa bottleneck
  • Genetic load appears indifferent across 40,000 years of European history
  • New DNA extraction approach recovers up to 33 times more DNA from ancient remains

Summary

Few complete human genomes from the European Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) have been sequenced. Using novel sampling and DNA extraction approaches, we sequenced the genome of a woman from “Peştera Muierii,” Romania who lived ∼34,000 years ago to 13.5× coverage. The genome shows similarities to modern-day Europeans, but she is not a direct ancestor. Although her cranium exhibits both modern human and Neanderthal features, the genome shows similar levels of Neanderthal admixture (∼3.1{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6}) to most EUP humans but only half compared to the ∼40,000-year-old Peştera Oase 1. All EUP European hunter-gatherers display high genetic diversity, demonstrating that the severe loss of diversity occurred during and after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) rather than just during the out-of-Africa migration. The prevalence of genetic diseases is expected to increase with low diversity; however, pathogenic variant load was relatively constant from EUP to modern times, despite post-LGM hunter-gatherers having the lowest diversity ever observed among Europeans.

Translation: there was even more genetic diversity among early humans than previously believed, which further increases the required rate of time per fixed mutation. 

Or to put the point in even more simple terms, it is mathematically more credible to claim that you drove from New York to Los Angeles in a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado in one hour on a single tank of gas than to claim that any modern mammal evolved from the first crown group mammal in the amounts of time currently estimated.

A little reminder

 I’m not expecting anything exciting to come out of the Geneva talks between Russian President Putin and US Fake President Fake Biden, but apparently the Sino-Russian alliance isn’t being subtle about reminding everyone who has the initiative now:

Russia and China have heaped pressure on Joe Biden with provocative military drills in the Pacific and the South China Sea ahead of the US President’s showdown with Vladimir Putin in Geneva today. 

USAF stealth fighters were scrambled to Hawaii on Sunday as Moscow launched its biggest naval exercises in the Pacific since the Cold War, while in the South China Sea, an American carrier group has steamed in as Chinese warplanes tear around Taiwan.  

Biden will finally sit down with Putin on Wednesday for their first presidential summit on Lake Geneva – the choice of venue harking back to the Cold War meeting between Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. 

Relations between the two sides are similarly cool – at their lowest ebb in decades after Putin’s outlandish cyber attacks against the US, aggression towards Ukraine, poisoning of Alexei Navalny and intervention in the Middle East.

Putin arrived at Geneva airport early this afternoon, a day after Biden, ahead of the meeting at the Villa de la Grange, a stunning chateau overlooking Lake Geneva ripe for photo-ops and small talk filled with bookcases, Trompe l’oeil ceiling details and a colorful rose garden. 

What appears to be taking place is stage-managing the displacement of the USA as the premier global power. This is a delicate process, chiefly because very few in the USA even believe this is possible, much less that it has already taken place. But people who pay close attention to these matters have been anticpating and planning for this moment for more than a decade.

The fear expressed that “a real decline of the West, particularly the United States, would have dramatic consequences for the Jewish people,” also led to controversy. Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz agreed that this type of decline can be expected “in the coming two decades” – but Stuart Eisenstadt was less emphatic about it. He believes the United States will remain the leading power. In all events, it was agreed the Jews “should strengthen cultural links with non-Western civilizations, particularly China and also India,” powers that are on the ascent.

That was 14 years ago. However, as we’ve seen, the project to establish a cultural connection with China did not go so well. 

Mailvox: It’s ALWAYS about the Boomer

Boomers really have an incredible inability to not try to make everything – literally everything – about themselves:

How many “conservative” individuals and outlets that have complained about the entertainment industry have so much as mentioned Arktoons?

Perhaps grandparents have looked in people associated with arktoons and the whole “day of the pillow’ bothers them. Could be why some of them are not looking to arktoons as an option. I mean really, when both options want you to die…..

It could be, but it obviously isn’t. That explanation is both self-serving and utterly implausible, considering that every single alternative site and system suffers from the same lack of conservative interest in utilizing alternatives to the Big Tech sites they are constantly crying about.

But it is a fascinating example of the Boomer’s well-honed ability to find any possible angle to insert his g-g-generation into the c-c-conversation.

And to the contrary, I expect that Day of the Pillow is not only going to be the most popular comic on Arktoons, but the first one to break out into mainstream social media and a primary driver of subscription growth.

Tuesday PM Arktoons

 THE AWAKENER Episode 7: Deep State Plans (R)

CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Episode 7: Blood on the Streets

Please note that this episode of The Awakener is R-rated. What we’re planning to do to make the site reliably family-friendly, once we’ve got content lockdown functionality added, is to limit access to R-rated comics to subscribers, and subscribers will be able to set the age-rating for their account to anything from child-only to all-access. But we’re probably three months away from that right now, so just be aware that some of the content from our partners is not intended for all ages.

Hunting wacists

As if all the black-on-white murders weren’t bad enough, now blacks are literally hunting white people in the USA:

Justin Tyran Roberts, a 39-year-old black man, was targeting white males in his two day long shooting spree that spanned two states, according to police.

Roberts is accused of shooting and wounding five people in Georgia and Alabama over the weekend.

Detective Brandon Lockhart testified on Monday that Roberts told police that “white men had picked on him and wronged him for all his life,” according to a report from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.

“Basically, he explained throughout his life, specifically white males had taken from him, and also what he described as military-looking white males had taken from him,” Detective Lockhart said.

The police do not believe that there was any connection between Roberts and the victims, all of whom are expected to recover.

The five shootings took place during three separate assaults in Columbus, Georgia and Phenix City, Alabama.

The problem, of course, is wacism. If only white Americans would stop being so wacist, black men would not have to hunt them and shoot them.

So stop being wacist. Or else.

Oh, by the way, we are reliably informed by Ivy League academics that all whites are inherently wacist. So, you know, good luck with all that not-wacisting. 

PS: avoiding people who are hunting you is also wacist. Nice try.

PPS: Black Lives Matter!

Corporate cancer kills quickly

Nickelodeon proudly leaned into the predatory market and managed to lose more than 70 percent of its audience:

A bigger hole is forming for Viacom, however. Whereas Paramount+ is growing slowly, their children’s programming platform, Nickelodeon, is imploding. That’s not an overstatement.

Since July of 2017, Nickelodeon’s viewership has dropped from 1.3 million average viewers per week to a June of 2021 average of only 372,000. In only four years, Nickelodeon has dropped more than two thirds of its audience. That is catastrophically bad for the cable channel, but with cable on the way out, maybe it’s not so bad? The catch here is that it is, in fact, that bad and perhaps worse, simply because Nickelodeon seems to be the primary driving force behind new subscribers to Paramount+.

It’s thus easy to see why Viacom is leaning so heavily into older Nickelodeon content. Perhaps hoping to capitalize on what once worked versus what is rapidly losing audience, the company has resurrected Rugrats and iCarly (among other shows) to try to drive nostalgic fans to the service. But there are signs that Viacom has not learned any lessons and is retrofitting these old shows with the same principles that have resulted in Nickelodeon’s huge loss in ratings…. 

Nickelodeon’s latest fiasco was a Pride Month video that you can see above. Featuring a drag queen singing to prepubescents, the YouTube version was downvoted to such a degree that they’ve now hidden the ratio.

That’s an impressive collapse. Keep in mind the massive dropoff was before the ongoing Pride Month fiasco; it may be more than 80 percent by July 2021. But the sooner these awful organizations die off, the better. Don’t watch them. Don’t support them. And don’t let your children’s minds be polluted by them.

However, note that once more, conservatives would rather complain about the wicked than celebrate – or even mention – that which is good. How many “conservative” individuals and outlets that have complained about the entertainment industry have so much as mentioned Arktoons?

Employers can mandate vaccinations

That’s the ruling from a US District Court judge:

A Texas judge has dismissed a case filed by employees of the Houston Methodist hospital system over its policy on Covid-19 vaccinations, issuing the first federal ruling on whether employers can mandate inoculations.
US District Court Judge Lynn Hughes dismissed the lawsuit on Saturday, ruling that Houston Methodist had the legal right to force employees to be vaccinated – even though the jabs have only received emergency-use authorization, not full approval, from the FDA. He said the claim by the 117 employees who sued the hospital system that the inoculations were experimental and dangerous was both “false” and “irrelevant,” as Texas law protects workers from wrongful termination only if they are fired for refusing to commit an act that carries criminal penalties.
“We can now put this behind us and continue our focus on unparalleled safety, quality, service, and innovation,” Houston Methodist chief executive Marc Boom said in a statement.
Houston Methodist put 178 employees on unpaid leave last Monday because they had refused to be vaccinated against Covid-19. The workers are scheduled to be fired on June 21 if they still haven’t complied with the mandate. In a message to staff last week, Boom chided the recalcitrant staffers, saying, “Unfortunately, a small number of individuals have decided not to put their patients first.”
The plaintiffs had argued that, by forcing them to take a vaccine that hadn’t gone through the extensive clinical trials needed for full FDA approval, Houston Methodist was essentially requiring them to be “human guinea pigs” in a de facto drug trial. Hughes ruled that, as a private employer, the hospital system didn’t have to give employees the option of refusing vaccination, and he found that they weren’t being forced into a human experiment because Houston Methodist hadn’t applied or been certified to conduct clinical trials.

It seems there is going to be an opportunity soon for people to start vaxx-free businesses. After all, if an employer can mandate vaccinations, it can also mandate vaccine-free status. And that might be an excellent way to filter out stupid and short-sighted people during the hiring process.

I tend to doubt this ruling will hold up, though. The judge appears to have made her decision more on the basis of her disapproval of the plaintiffs’ comparison to the holocaust than anything else. Still, it underlines the absolute insanity of the libertarian “private corporations are holy and their actions shalt not be questioned or infringed upon by the law” position.

And it is also clear that “the law” is now little more than a synonym for “evil word magic”. But it would still be helpful if the Texas legislature would immediately pass a new law banning vaccine mandates for employees.