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The Best They’ve Got II

Yesterday, I posted the first part of my critical review of Jason Rosenhouse’s 2022 book Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism, published by Cambridge University Press, in which I demonstrated how he badly misrepresented significant elements of the 1966 Wistar Symposium and how he falsely claimed that the biologists there had adequately answered the challenges posed to the Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis by the mathematicians.

Rosenhouse also makes three important assertions in a single paragraph on page 124 in Chapter 4: The Legacy of the Wistar Conference, each of which claims that subsequent work has vindicated the biologists and refuted the mathematicians. However, none of them is accompanied by any evidence within the chapter itself.

Assertion 1: “Molecular biology and computer science were both in a very rudimentary state when the conference was held in 1966. Both fields have blossomed spectacularly in the ensuing decades, with results that have not been kind to the perspectives of Eden and Schützenberger. Molecular biologists have learned a lot about the geometrical structure of protein space, and their results make Eden’s simplistic combinatorial calculations look hopelessly naive.”

Rosenhouse provides no citations. He names no studies nor molecular biologists. No results actually described. No quantifications are offered, just a general statement about how subsequent developments “have not been kind”, whatever that is actually supposed to mean. Rosenhouse does not tell the reader what the geometrical structure of protein space actually looks like, whether functional proteins are in fact densely connected by single-step mutations, or what fraction of single-residue changes preserve function in any specific protein family. He simply asserts that the results exist and implies that those results are devastating for the arguments presented by Eden and Schützenberger, then moves on. The reader is expected to take this on faith and, presumably, to wait for all of this to be shown to him in Chapter 6.

This failure to actually support his assertions with any details at all is particularly egregious because either those results exist or they do not. If molecular biologists have demonstrated that functional proteins are densely connected stepping stones in sequence space, that result would have a name, a date, and a journal. Rosenhouse does not provide any of these. The most relevant empirical work, deep mutational scanning studies, actually shows the opposite of what Rosenhouse implies. Single-residue changes to most proteins tend to reduce or destroy function. The fitness landscape is rugged, not smooth. Eden’s 1966 concerns about the rarity of functional proteins in sequence space have been confirmed by subsequent experimental work, not refuted by it.

Assertion 2: “Schützenberger’s arguments about computer simulations have likewise not held up, and computer simulations of the evolutionary process are now commonplace.”

This is a non sequitur disguised as a refutation. The fact that computer simulations of evolution are “commonplace” does not even begin to address Schützenberger’s argument. Schützenberger’s point was not that you cannot simulate selection on a computer. His point was that random typographic changes to a program, changes that are not guided by a fitness function designed by the programmer, do not produce functional programs. The existence of evolutionary algorithms does not refute this, because every evolutionary algorithm ever written has a programmer-designed fitness function that does exactly what Schützenberger said biology lacks: it provides the mapping between typographic changes and functional outcomes. The programmer is the intelligence that Schützenberger said was missing. Dawkins’s WEASEL program is the perfect example: it works because Dawkins specified the target string, the fitness function, and the selection rule. Remove any of these programmer-supplied components and his simulation produces nothing. Rosenhouse does not address this distinction at all. He simply notes that computer simulations exist and treats their existence as a refutation, as if Falcon 3.0 and Spore somehow proved Schützenberger wrong.

Assertion 3: The section heading “The Two Pillars of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism” and the final section imply that subsequent chapters will deliver the killing blow. The chapter ends by promising that “We will discuss this work in Chapter 6.”

This is the most revealing move. Rosenhouse has spent an entire chapter arguing that the mathematicians at Wistar were wrong and that the biologists successfully answered them. But his own chapter provides no quantitative refutation of any of the three mathematical arguments provided by the biologists at the time or by anyone else since. Eden’s sequence-space calculation stands unchallenged by any number Rosenhouse provides. Ulam’s rate calculation stands unchallenged by any rate Rosenhouse computes. Schützenberger’s formal-language argument stands unchallenged by any mechanism Rosenhouse identifies. After 26 pages of rhetoric, historical misrepresentation, and posturing, the actual mathematical demonstration is deferred to a later chapter the reader has yet to read.

Which is why, in my third and final post on Rosenhouse’s book, we’ll examine whether he delivered on those three promises or not.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Epic Day

Ladies and gentlemen, Castalia House is fairly bursting with pride to announce an original complete and unabridged English translation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Sangokushi, the epic Japanese novel of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with the publication of Volume 10: Wuzhang Plains.

A falling star appears over the plains of Wuzhang, and the man who saw it understands the omen.

Zhuge Liang has given his all. Six northern campaigns, each one successful, but insufficient to win the war. The kingdom of Shu is too small, its resources too thin, and its emperor too weak to hold what his father built without the man who has borne the burden of responsibility upon his shoulders. Kongming knows the future. He has always known it. He came down from his secluded mountain against his better judgment, and he has been at war with destiny ever since.

Volume Ten of Yoshikawa Eiji’s saga is the final act. Kongming and Sima Yi face each other for the last time across the plains, and the duel between them is no longer just a contest of strategies, but a war against time itself. Kongming’s body is failing. He neither eats nor sleeps, and the men who follow him can see what is happening and know what is coming. When the end comes, it is stranger and more haunting than anything that came before.

After the Dragon falls, the story does not end. Instead, it transforms. The age of heroes gives way to the age of heirs, and the passage from Wei to Jin completes the long arc that began in a peach garden with three men and an oath. The Three Kingdoms are gone. What they represented endures to this day.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Best They’ve Got I

One name that was unfamiliar to me was brought up several times amidst the panoply of purported “criticisms” and “debunkings” of Probability Zero that are presently being flung around by hundreds of evolutionary enthusiasts, very few of whom have actually read the book. That name is Jason Rosenhouse, the author of Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Anti-scientific misinformation has become a serious problem on many fronts, including vaccinations and climate change. One of these fronts is the persistence of anti-evolutionism, which has recently been given a superficially professional gloss in the form of the intelligent design movement. Far from solely being of interest to researchers in biology, anti-evolutionism must be recognized as part of a broader campaign with a conservative religious and political agenda. Much of the rhetorical effectiveness of anti-evolutionism comes from its reliance on seemingly precise mathematical arguments. This book, the first of its kind to be written by a mathematician, discusses and refutes these arguments. Along the way, it also clarifies common misconceptions about both biology and mathematics. Both lay audiences and professionals will find the book to be accessible and informative.

I read it, of course, in order to see if he had somehow anticipated my own demonstration of the mathematical impossibility of evolution by natural selection, selective sweeps, neutral sweeps, genetic drift, ILS, biased gene conversion, and every other imagined mechanism, but, as it turns out, he hadn’t. Nothing that he addresses in his book has anything whatsoever to do with my own mathematical work on the subject. Rosenhouse’s book has two primary objectives. First and foremost, he was attempting to defuse the anti-evolutionary work of the Intelligent Design community, beginning with Michael Behe and William Dembski. Since I’m not familiar with their work and since their work does not overlap with mine, I’ll leave it to the latter to address Mr. Rosenhouse’s critique.

Rosenhouse’s book is objectively bad. It purports to be a critique of mathematics as used by ID proponents and of my mathematical work in particular. Yet it betrays a lack of comprehension throughout. It makes a virtue of misrepresentation.

I’m not in a position to have an opinion one way or the other. However, what I can say is that Dembke’s summary is consistent with the parts of the book that addressed something I do know, and which concern Rosenhouse’s attempt to mitigate the serious damage to the mathematical credibility of evolutionary theory that resulted from the 1966 Wistar Symposium, which I have read and to which I devoted an entire chapter of PZ. To put it charitably, Rosenhouse systematically misrepresents the entire debate between the mathematicians and the biologists, and falsely claims that the mathematical issues raised by the mathematicians there were successfully addressed by the biologists present.

His account of Wistar is simply not accurate. It is a systematic misrepresentation of the transcript of the Symposium in three different ways: factual errors, strategic omissions, and interpretive falsehoods and distortions. Here is a systematic analysis of Rosenhouse’s description of the symposium:

Factual Errors

  1. “Only two posed challenges to evolution’s fundamental soundness.”
    Rosenhouse claims only Eden and Schützenberger challenged evolution, and that Ulam “was not challenging the fundamental soundness of the theory.” This is flatly contradicted by the transcript. Ulam explicitly states: “What I am going to do will come to Eden’s conclusions.” He also says, in the discussion, “In contrast to the tone of the discussion I took, personally, I believe that the numbers I took are very optimistic”—meaning he believes the real situation for neo-Darwinism is worse than his model suggests, not that he was merely sketching a neutral mathematical exercise. Rosenhouse’s selective quotation of Ulam’s modest throat-clearing about “schematic thinking” and “a starting point for discussion” is a textbook example of mistaking courtesy for agnosticism. Ulam was just being polite. He was not even remotely neutral on the fundamental soundness of evolution.
  2. “Schützenberger’s presentation is muddled.”
    The transcript appears muddled because it was OCR’d and the scanning was very bad. Schützenberger’s argument is perfectly clear: he introduced three topological spaces, argued that the mapping between the first and second is the unsolved problem, and concluded that “there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe that this gap cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology.” Rosenhouse treats the garbled OCR as evidence of confused thinking. This is either dishonest or lazy. He could have checked a physical copy of the proceedings like I did.
  3. The attribution of the “stepping-stone” argument to the biologists.
    Rosenhouse constructs an elaborate analogy involving truffle hogs, river crossings, stepping stones and presents it as though it captures what the biologists actually said at Wistar. It does not. No biologist at the conference presented a stepping-stone model of protein evolution. No biologist calculated the density of functional proteins in the neighborhood of any existing protein. No biologist demonstrated that the local search space is sufficiently dense to support the model. Rosenhouse invented the analogy in 2022 and projected it backward onto a 1966 transcript where it does not appear. This is the classic Fictional Defender move we’ve seen from both the Neo-Darwinists and the Neo-Kantians: constructing a more defensible version of the position than any past figure ever actually articulated, then declaring that this post-facto invented defense answers the challenge to the original’s case.
  4. Ulam’s quote about Eden is misrepresented.
    Rosenhouse quotes Ulam saying that Eden’s comments “refer to a random construction of such molecules and even those of us who are in the majority here, the non-mathematicians, realize that this is not the problem at all.” He uses this to claim Ulam was criticizing Eden. But the transcript shows Ulam was agreeing with Eden’s broader point while noting that the first five minutes of Eden’s talk addressed a preliminary issue that was not the central problem. Ulam immediately goes on to develop his own argument about rates that reaches the same conclusion Eden reached. Rosenhouse presents Ulam as an ally of the biologists. The transcript shows him as an ally of Eden.

Strategic Omissions

  1. Wald’s complete irrelevance is never acknowledged.
    Rosenhouse does not mention that George Wald’s formal presentation on “The Problems of Vicarious Selection” had absolutely nothing to do with the mathematical challenges. Wald talked about luminescent bacteria on deep-sea fish and the mating habits of eels and lampreys. This was one of the “formidable talents” assembled to respond to the mathematicians, and his response was to give a paper on an entirely different subject. Rosenhouse presents the biologists as having answered the challenges effectively. He omits the fact that one of his star witnesses didn’t even show up to the fight.
  2. Lewontin’s admission is buried.
    Rosenhouse quotes Lewontin’s point about enzyme changes as though it settles the matter. He does not mention Lewontin’s admission, under direct questioning from Schützenberger, that he cannot justify the continuity assumption that small genetic changes typically produce small phenotypic changes. The transcript records Lewontin saying, “That is a very good question. I don’t know.” This is the single most important exchange in the entire symposium, because the continuity assumption is what makes hill-climbing selection work. Without it, the entire stepping-stone model that Rosenhouse constructed collapses. He omits it entirely. I, of course, specifically cited it in Probability Zero.
  3. Wald’s observation that supported Eden is omitted.
    Wald stated that he was “hard put to find a single instance” where a single amino acid change in hemoglobin did not “change markedly the properties.” This is relevant to Eden’s argument about the ruggedness of the fitness landscape—if nearly every single-residue change has significant functional consequences, then the space is rugged, not smooth, and local search is unreliable. Rosenhouse omits this because it directly contradicts his stepping-stone narrative.
  4. Crosby’s support for the mathematicians is left out.
    Rosenhouse quotes Crosby’s exasperated comment about “gorgeous unreality” as though it refutes the mathematicians. He does not mention that in the discussion of Eden’s paper, Crosby actually supported Eden’s argument, noting that each intermediate stage “has got to be capable of existing viably” and that frame-shift mutations “decrease enormously the possibility of intermediate stages being viable.” Crosby was frustrated with what he felt were oversimplifications in Ulam’s model; he was not dismissing the mathematical challenge as a whole.
  5. No biologist produced a single calculation.
    This is the single most important omission in the entire chapter. Rosenhouse never acknowledges that not one biologist at the conference produced a single calculation that contradicted the mathematicians’ conclusions, because acknowledging it would destroy his thesis. Eden calculated the size of sequence space. No one calculated a smaller space. Ulam calculated a rate. No one calculated a faster rate. Schützenberger asked for a mechanism. No one demonstrated one. The biologists asserted, objected, analogized, and hand-waved. They did not even attempt to do the math. Rosenhouse’s entire chapter is structured to conceal this fact.

Falsehoods and Distortions

  1. The Kansas/New Jersey analogy is backwards.
    Rosenhouse argues that Schützenberger’s computer-program analogy fails because computer languages are like Kansas (words widely scattered) while the genetic code is like New Jersey (words densely packed). His evidence is that there are 64 codons and all of them code for something. This is true at the codon level, but it is irrelevant to Schützenberger’s argument, which was about proteins, not codons. Every codon codes for an amino acid or a stop, but that does not mean every protein is functional. The question is not whether every three-letter word in the genetic language means something, but whether every 250-letter sentence is grammatical. The answer is overwhelmingly no. Eden had already shown this: the space of 250-residue proteins is ~10^325, and the number of functional proteins that have ever existed is ~10^52. Rosenhouse attacked a strawman of his own construction, refuted an argument Schützenberger was not making, and claimed to have refuted Schützenberger.
  2. Waddington’s summary is presented as authoritative.
    Rosenhouse quotes Waddington’s summary as “exactly right” and as proof that the biologists won the argument. But Waddington’s summary is a diplomatic statement of the biologists’ position, not a demonstration that the position is correct. Waddington asserts that “the meaningful section” of explored sequence space “is quite large in comparison with all the things that could conceivably be made out of it in single steps.” This is an empirical claim. He provides no data to support it. He provides no calculation. He simply asserts it. Rosenhouse treats this assertion as though it were a proof. It is not. It is the claim that required proving, and no one at Wistar even tried to prove it.
  3. Mayr’s “adjust the figures” quote is reinterpreted in a false context.
    Rosenhouse devotes enormous effort to providing context for Mayr’s statement that “somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right.” He tries to claim that Mayr was making the sophisticated point that Ulam’s model was too simple to be useful. But the transcript shows Mayr was simply retreating to the argument from existence. “We are comforted by knowing that evolution has occurred” is not a mathematical rebuttal. It is not even a scientific argument. It is a profession of blind faith. Mayr was asserting that the numbers must work out because the conclusion is already known. It was nothing more than an appeal to hope in help that would never arrive.
  4. The “biologists were right” framing is unsupported by the transcript.
    Rosenhouse attempts to paint the picture that the biologists successfully answered the mathematicians at Wistarr. The transcript proves the opposite. The biologists offered qualitative objections (things are more complicated than your model), anecdotal counterexamples (hemoglobin variants survive single changes), conceptual reframings (you’re modeling it wrong), and existential assertions (evolution happened, so the math must work). None of these constitute a quantitative refutation. None of them even began to solve the problems the mathematicians identified. And the mathematicians themselves did not accept the biologists’ responses as adequate, and the closing remarks by the host of the symposium made it clear that he did not believe the biologists’ collective response was adequate or that the situation had been resolved.

In my second post on Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism later this week, I’ll review whether Jason Rosenhouse provided any evidence of his claim in the book that the Wistar mathematicians’ various anti-evolutionary arguments were successfully refuted during the sixty years since the end of the Symposium or not.

DISCUSS ON SG

Watering the Desert

The EU is getting desperate. They burned down their economies and enraged their native populations for less than nothing:

“It feels like we’re watering the desert,” one of the European diplomats told Le Monde.

The article notes that Ukraine’s request for additional funding comes at a “delicate political moment” when the EU is focused on negotiations on the multi-year budget of the union. Despite the fact that the budget provides for a €100 billion aid package for Ukraine for 2028-2034, Germany and its supporters want to reduce this amount.

The situation is also influenced by the fact that in 2027 a series of elections is planned in the member countries of the bloc – in France, Spain, Poland and Italy, where, according to Le Monde, the topic of financing Ukraine is “particularly sensitive.” European governments are facing severe internal pressure. The local population is less and less ready to “tighten their belts” for the sake of sponsoring Ukraine.

Europeans never wanted to finance a war against Russia. They were happy to cheer on the USA and UK doing so, but they never expected to finance it, let alone fight one themselves. And now the economic collapse due to energy prices is already underway.

The problems that European countries are facing now are so critical that Europe is being “eaten alive,” US President Donald Trump told his supporters in Texas. “Look at what’s happened to Europe. They are being eaten alive,” he said. Europe is going through a major energy crisis. AFP reported, citing EU statistics, that October 1 saw the highest diesel fuel price in the European Union, reaching 2.24 euros per liter on average.

That’s $8.50 per gallon. That’s not sustainable. Fortunately, there is an easy solution. Wave the white flag, stop funding the Kiev regime, rebuild the Nordstream pipeline, and start buying Russian gas again. That’s going to happen, sooner or later, so the smart thing to do is end the economic torment before the popular revolutions begin.

DISCUSS ON SG

Skol, but…

The Purple are 4-0 and on top of the NFC North. Beaten the Packers. Beaten the Bears. The defense is more than on point.

And I haven’t had this little confidence in the offense since Bob Lee was starting the NFC championship game.

Kyler Murray is not a rookie and yet he can’t complete a pass to the WRs on the outside. I don’t know if KOC’s offense is too complex for him, he just doesn’t put in the work to learn it, or if he simply can’t see downfield, but Carson Wentz actually looks much better and Wentz is one-game backup material.

The Bears third-string quarterback is better than our starter or our backup. And as much as I like former Gopher Max Brosman – and it was cool to see his ex-teammates bringing the Little Brown Jug to the game to show him – what little we saw of him last year wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring.

If KOC and Flores win the division they both deserve raises, coach and coordinator of the year awards, and a new quarterback.

DISCUSS ON SG

Erika Needs Help

Fair enough. She’s going to need all the help that she can get. But I really fail to see what difference it’s going to make, no matter how many butterfly collectors she assembles.

GIVE ME YOUR OPINIONS ON VOX DAY’S WORK TO APPEAR IN AN UPCOMING VIDEO:

Hey guys (and Mr. Theodore Beale)

As I compose a video on the work of Creationist/Bad Guy Vox Day (Theodore Beale) I have been paying close attention to his blog. You will be pleased to know he has posted an update to his evolution-defeater: Mittens 3.0 (for real this time).

Additionally this man has been crashing out and obsessively making blog posts responding to Youtube comments (instead of just responding to the comments). For this morning’s post we see this charming line regarding friends of the channel Grayson and Creation Myths:

“It should be amusing to catalog all of the various things this slur is going to get wrong in his desperate attempt to prove that math which has been confirmed by every major AI system and more than 10 math PhDs is “stupid”.”

Setting aside the AI stuff, wow 10 math phds! Now I am only aware of three people with doctorates who have “vetted” Day’s work, and they are all associates of the Discovery Institute, but I thought this might be a fun opportunity.

Many of you are highly credentialed and have atomized various portions of Day’s anti-evolution “model” here and elsewhere. I thought it might be fun to compile a list to act as both a resource for why this clown is wrong and as a fun dig in an upcoming video of mine.

Here’s the activity:

If you have a bachelors, masters, or doctorate and have reviewed any of Day’s work please leave a comment outlining your favorite blunder and your credentials.

It does not have to be limited to Mittens 3.0 because Probability Zero (which contains all prior errors) is still for sale and therefore is a part of the public record until Day issues a formal retraction.

This list will appear in an upcoming video of mine so please keep that in mind before commenting! I’m hoping to have a nice count of “credentialed people who think Day’s math (+ assumptions which go into it) is steaming hot garbage”.

Additional acknowledgements:

  • No Day is not worth any of our time but since his work was broadcast to my audience I have a responsibility to provide a detailed counter.
  • Yes Day is a dweeb

This is fascinating. The more credentials, the merrier, I always say. So. Many. Skulls!

Are you not entertained!

I am, of course, deeply intimidated by this formidable army of credentialed academics being arrayed against me. I feel like Sauron in Mordor, alone and surrounded by implacable foes.

Is this how it always ends for dark lords?

Will there never be a happy ending?

UPDATE: Let them do their thing and take their best shot. Don’t correct them. Don’t argue with them. Don’t engage with them at all. Let’s see what they can do with what they’ve got. After they drop the Team Evolution video, that will be the time to have some fun.

DISCUSS ON SG

They Didn’t Read the Book

A regular here jumped on the grenade for everyone who, like myself, lacked the fortitude to sit through three-and-a-half hours of two people discussing a book that neither of them had bothered to read, and thereby gleaned the following information from the recent video by Dr. Erika and Dr. Hanson.

  • Erika: “Will doesn’t include in his presentation how d is actually calculated, but I suspected it was probably in Vox’s book. So I just texted one of my several friends who are reading through the book right now and sort of yucking it up with me via text messages over it, and I was like, ‘Hey, does anybody have the definition for his selection coefficient d?’ And my friend said that on page 153, in the chapter titled ‘The Overlapping Generations Problem,’ d is defined as the fraction of the population replaced per time unit…”
  • Dr. Hanson: “So because of all of that, I don’t foresee any population geneticist, one, even knowing who Vox is, or two, being like bothering with ever reading a book that’s probably mostly written by AI.”
  • Erika: “That’s just based off of what Will presented to us. Of course, Vox has a book floating around out there. I wonder—I wonder if maybe I should read it and then, like, make fun of it with some of my friends? Like, go through some of the more in-depth claims, or I should say extraneous claims, that exist in that book. That might be fun…”
  • Erika: “There’s no doubt in my mind that Vox is going to respond to this video, and he’s probably going to say something to the tune of, ‘You didn’t answer all of the points that I made in my book. All you did was address Will Duffy’s points.’ And it’s like, yes, that was the priority of this video.”
  • Erika: “It’s also worth noting that in some places he has complained that people who criticize him actually haven’t read his book… So all of those things together put an evil little idea in my head. I was talking to Zach and a couple other of my friends who have relevant formal training in areas in and surrounding this exact topic, and we kind of just thought to ourselves, ‘Man, what if we just did read the book? What if we read it and then got together and critiqued the book as a whole, and we can each bring our favorite parts of the book to this round table together and we can sort of atomize it?’ …You can expect that to come within a couple of weeks, a week maybe, of this video. We’re just going to actually go through Probability Zero, and it’s probably going to take a long time.”

Interesting. I was pretty confident that Erika hadn’t read the book, but I was under the impression that Dr. Hanson had read the 2nd edition, specifically, on the basis of some of his comments. Believe it or not, I have no problem whatsoever with evolutionists attempting to critique Probability Zero or The Frozen Gene without bothering to read them first. It’s their credibility and their careers on the line, not mine. And they certainly make my job as the author significantly easier, because I have neither the reason nor the responsibility to respond to any critique by anyone who hasn’t read the book he is purporting to critique and isn’t even addressing the relevant details.

So that’s my initial response to their 210 minutes of not discussing my book: they didn’t read it and they didn’t discuss it, they simply discussed what they imagined it must be. Although perhaps someone should warn Erika what happened to the last female critic who thought that reading through one of my books and critiquing it would be fun.

But talking about the book without reading it is absolutely fine, so long as that’s made clear, which both of them obviously did. I have never paid attention to their videos before and they have yet to give me any reason to start doing so. I might as reasonably respond by talking about The Refutation of Kant and providing proof of the amphiboly in das Ding an sich, as that’s another of my books they also haven’t read. Or, for that matter, the Amorran formations in A Throne of Bones.

This isn’t to say that their video is worthless. To the contrary, it gives us a very clear picture of the current state of the field’s mainstream understanding of itself as well as how it is unprepared to defend this particular front. Now, perhaps this evolutionary round table Erika is assembling will do better. It certainly should do better on the basis of actually having a target at which to shoot. And when I respond, I will respond in detail to every material criticism of my mathematical disproof of evolution by any, all, and every mechanism, including natural selection, raised in both of the videos. While I am aware that Erika and Dr. Hanson spent some time discussing me on a personal level, I didn’t even bother reading that part of the transcript.

I’ve been getting attacked personally for 25 years now. I don’t care. I’m a former Wax Trax! recording artist and my own fans and Vile Faceless Minions refer to me as Supreme Dark Lord. So I think the mainstream narrative of me being a Very Bad Man has been sufficiently established that we can all just take it as given and get on with the substantive discussion. I mean, what part of “downright evil” is hard to understand?

  • “Vox Day is one sick puppy.” —Dr. P.Z. Myers, PhD
  • “Vox Day is a fascist mega-dickbag and less a human being than one long sequence of junk DNA.” —Dr. Phil Sandifer, PhD
  • “I consider Vox Day one step, either direction, from certifiable.” —Mike Resnick, science fiction author, 38-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “I think I have made my disgust with Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies clear.” —George R. R. Martin, fantasy author, 19-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “Vox Day rises all the way to ‘downright evil’. ” —Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Manager of Science Fiction, Tor Books, 15-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being.” —John Scalzi, three-time SFWA President and science fiction author, 9-time Hugo nominee
  • “Vox Day and his followers made it impossible for me to remain silent, keep calm, and carry on.” —Connie Willis, science fiction author, 24-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “The real burning question is, ‘what will Vox Day attack next?’” —Charles Stross, science fiction author, 15-time Hugo Award nominee

Well, at least we have the answer to Charles Stross’s question, as St. Darwin is truly dead. And thanks to one of my readers, we can even add to the collection:

  • “Vox Day is one of the worst people I have covered in this channel. He is unambiguously a raging racist, giga-misogynist and clinical narcissist (no hyperbole).”—Erika Whatever her name is, Youtuber and armchair psychiatrist

My only thought is that she never covered Richard Dawkins, Stephen Gould, Steven Pinker, Ed Boyden, Marc Hauser, Martin Nowak, David Sloan Wilson, George Church, or any of the other big-name evolutionists who used to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein? Well, I suppose she did say only “one of the worst”. I’ll just have to do better.

Despite being a recently diagnosed clinical narcissist, I don’t need their attention. I never sent out a single press release for the book. I’ve done zero book signings and no public events. There was no book launch party. You can even see from my publication history that I almost entirely stopped paying attention to evolution from February to September. So whether they engage or not makes very little difference to me. If and when they do, I’ll address the critiques and any mistakes they identify. If they don’t, then the work stands as it is until someone can come along and actually show that it doesn’t.

DISCUSS ON SG

Back to the 70s

It’s not often that I find myself wishing I was back in Minnesota. But seeing College GameDay there, watching the Michigan game and seeing the Golden Gophers reclaim the Little Brown Jug at home for the first time since 1977 definitely felt like a heartwarming blast from the past. I didn’t attend that game, but I attended several around that time – one game against Indiana is particularly strong in my memory – and it was so long ago that Tony Dungy, the retired Super Bowl-winning coach of the Colts and the Buccaneers, was the Gophers’ quarterback at the time.

Anyhow, congrats to all the Gophers and Gophers alumni for defeating the Wolverines at their new home.

College football is so much better with a) the playoffs, b) NIL preventing the big boys from stocking all the best players four-deep and c) all the new outdoor stadiums. I’m watching it again for the first time in decades.

And now that the Gophers are reclaiming the Little Brown Jug, can another Super Bowl appearance for the Vikings be far behind? Young Nasty University does look a lot like the Purple People Eaters of yore.

DISCUSS ON SG

PZ on PZ

Hey, the old wannabe Fifth Horseman of the New Atheism is back! They’re mostly dead now and he’s been irrelevant for at least a decade, but apparently if there is one thing that is going to wake him up and get that weary old ticker thumping again, it’s the unholy marriage of William Dembski and myself. Which is really a terribly dramatic way to describe an interview, but whatever.

Vox has an undergraduate degree in economics and East Asian studies from Bucknell University, a small private liberal arts college. He does not have a science degree, and by his own admission he did not exactly apply himself to his studies….Any student who tells me that their achievement was developing an intuitive grasp of a subject is bullshitting me. Then he confirms it: Vox Day was a slacker who learned nothing in college.

He wishes he dropped out after his first semester, he seldom went to class, and didn’t bother reading the textbook — and he probably thinks that means he must have been a genius, rather than a lazy goof. It doesn’t speak well of Bucknell or his professors that they decided to get rid of him by putting him in a program of independent studies, rather than flunking him. I sorta sympathize with them. You get attached to your students and want to help them succeed, so you coach them through and design a limited curriculum that matches their abilities to allow them to finish the program. I guess we’re doing the students no favor if that just means their ego is stoked.

So if he has no background in or comprehension of biology, how did he write MITTENS? He explains it all: Apparently the proper way to use AI is to hammer its outputs through multiple iterations until it tells you the answer you want to hear.

He really does think he has disproven all of evolution all by himself, with a paper that contains all of 11 citations (a number I’d find unacceptable in an undergrad student paper that was much more narrow in its scope). Even worse, 7 of those citations are to the LTEE, and contradict his conclusions, and 2 are to ape genome sequencing papers whose authors would be surprised to learn how their work is being distorted. At least he has 2 that reinforce his argument, sorta, but they’re both also written by Vox Day.

So this is an argument made by an unqualified buffoon who churned it out of a battery of AIs, written with negligible knowledge of the scientific literature, and rubber-stamped by a couple of biased dorks from the Discovery Institute.

I’m definitely archiving this, because I very much want to have PZ on the record stating that I did everything by myself, with only a battery of AIs and an unacceptable number citations in an undergrad student paper. It’s going to be really fun to know that he is struggling to accept the reality that the man he has sincerely believed to be “an unqualified buffoon” has always been a world-class genius of historic levels, far more significant in the course of human intellectual development than sweet St. Darwin himself, who somehow managed to cripple Man’s correct understanding of his own origins for 167 years and counting.

Science was born free and everywhere it is in chains. I can’t do much about physics or sociology, but at least I can set the geneticists and biologists free.

The thing that I am finding so terribly amusing about all of this is that these scientific charlatans are so uncurious and so prone to posturing and resting on their credentials that it literally never occurs to them that I am nothing like them. It never occurs to them that maybe my professors weren’t stroking my ego, or making sure a lazy goof got his degree, but rather, catering to a student they regarded as “a brilliant fuckup”. Which is a direct quote from my favorite professor, by the way.

It never occurs to them to wonder why I wish I had dropped out of college. Jensen Huang knows. More than anyone, he’s the primary beneficiary of my return to university. But if you don’t understand why, that’s another story for another day.

And most of all, it never occurs to them that anyone might use AI creatively in a productive manner, one that observably augments human intelligence and makes things possible that were not previously possible. I’m not, of course, referring to the disproof of evolution by natural selection, since that was a piece of cake so obvious that I cannot believe anyone with half a brain capable of performing long division is still seriously trying to defend it. I never needed any AI assistance or augmentation for that.

Being the first man in history to solve the Agrippan Trilemma and other little puzzles like the Hard Problem of Consciousness, to say nothing of refuting Kant’s critique of pure reason, on the other hand, definitely required a bit of an artificial boost.

Anyhow, I just want PZ to remember every little thing he ever said about me in this regard as the horror gradually dawns in him as more and more people start actually doing the relevant math and confirming it for themselves. Because I won’t. I don’t think about him at all. I genuinely thought Pharyngula shut down years ago.

And here’s the more important thing for him to contemplate. If he was wrong about me, well, that’s going to sting a little. But it’s not really that big a deal in the cosmic scheme of things. But if he was wrong about Jesus Christ, on the other hand, that’s a much more serious problem. So if the former turns out to be true, however unlikely, maybe take another, closer, look at the latter.

UPDATE: Oh, Sweet St. Kimura, PZ doesn’t know the difference between a mutation and a fixation.

  • COMMENTER: Bill Dumbski [sic] is a nobody, full of himself. Every person born has about 100 mutations that neither of their parents had. But being willfully ignorant does have its advantages.
  • PZ: No, no — according to Vox, we are born with at most 1 mutation, and it’s going to be shared with the entire population, eventually. Don’t you know math?

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The Scholars Revolt

All across France, schools are burning due to scholarly unrest over the quality of their educations. Or something.

High schools across France have closed, thousands of teenagers have been arrested, and hundreds of people have suffered injuries as unrest over conditions in the lycée system has spread and erupted into violence in recent days. Roughly 3,000 people have been arrested since the protests began nearly two weeks ago outside of Paris, with nearly 2,000 being detained on Thursday alone, the French interior ministry announced.

As demonstrations have at times escalated into violent clashes, 170 students and 65 school staff members have been injured, according to education minister Édouard Geffray. Nearly 400 police officers have also reportedly suffered injuries.

And the protests showed no signs of abating on Friday, when roughly 900 demonstrations took place around France, according to police. More than 500 French schools remained closed as students set fires, blockaded schools, and clashed with riot police around the country.

Oh, those unruly French! Truly, somethings just never change… What a pity no one can discern the reason for this scholarly dissatisfaction!

DISCUSS ON SG