Category: Uncategorized

The Severing of Nine

The ill-fated JJ McCarthy experiment has ended. The former 10th pick in the draft was traded to the Giants for a 5th round pick. That he turned out to be a bust surprised very few Vikings fans, precisely ZERO of whom were happy about the draft choice in the first place. Nine actually turned out to be worse than Christian Ponder. And Christian Ponder was an equally unpopular first-round draft choice who is the icon of what passes for an unacceptable starting quarterback in Minnesota.

Consider their stats. In addition to being healthier his first two years, Ponder had better stats across the board. McCarthy had a slightly longer pass average, but his TD-INT rate was 0.92 compared to Ponder’s mediocre 1.24.

27 458 774 58.2 4,788 6.3 31 25 72 62 75.7 42.5
10 140 243 57.6 1,632 6.7 11 12 62 27 72.6 35.6

Again, not keeping Sam Darnold was not the problem. Keeping Darnold was untenable for a variety of reasons and it could have worked out well for all the parties concerned. But not keeping Daniel Jones when all they had to do was give him the chance to compete for the starting job, or even just give him the starting job in the first place, was absolutely unconscionable.

It’s a good trade for both teams. The Giants desperately need a backup and at least the Vikings got something out of the mess. And who knows, back in the day there was a young Vikings quarterback who was sent off to New York for a few years and things turned out rather well when he came back to Minnesota.

DISCUSS ON SG

Don’t Punctuate My Equilibrium, Bro

Punctuated equilibrium is a theory of speciation proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972. The problem it was designed to solve is straightforward: the fossil record doesn’t show what Darwin’s theory predicts. Which makes sense, of course, now that we’ve proven beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt that evolution by natural selection is mathematically impossible, never happened, and could not possibly happen. Something that never took place doesn’t leave evidence behind.

And yet, there is obviously evidence of something. So instead of the slow, gradual transitions from one species to another that classical evolutionary theory requires, what the rocks appear to show is species appearing abruptly, persisting unchanged for millions of years, and then suddenly being replaced by other species that also appear just as quickly. Gould and Eldredge proposed that this fossil pattern is meaningful, is not just an artifact of incomplete fossilization, and that speciation happens rapidly in small, isolated populations mutating rapidly under strong natural selection pressure. The result of the rapid mutations result in a burst of dramatic change in a few thousand years, followed by millions of years of stasis when the strong selection pressure abates.

They called this process Punctuated Equalibrium and it rapidly became one of the most influential ideas in evolutionary biology. For fifty years it has served as the standard explanation for why the fossil record looks the way it does. However, in the process of analyzing the data to figure out why the scientists sequencing the E. coli generations were playing it so coy with the average number of fixations per generation for the MITTENS 3.0 paper, a thought occurred to me: if half the populations subjected to very strong artificial pressure were developing genomic cancer, then what were the probabilities required for a species under sufficient selection pressure to speciate in a punctuated manner that would avoid the cancer and the subsequent inevitable extinction?

In our first paper, Punctuated Equilibrium and the Hypermutation Hazard: The Risks of Strong Selection Pressure, Athos and I identified a hazard built into PE’s own mechanism. The same small, isolated populations that PE requires for speciation to occur are exactly the same populations where dangerous recessive genes, specifically, genes for mismatch repair deficiency that cause a massive increase in cancer rates, get exposed as active. We estimated a 2.3% probability per founder event that PE’s mechanism would produce individuals with a condition equivalent to constitutional mismatch repair deficiency, which causes over 90% cancer incidence by age 20. That may not sound like much until you realize PE require hundreds of these founder events to explain speciation patterns across major groups of animals. Across 100 such events, the probability of hitting this biological landmine at least once exceeds 90 percent.

However, the Red Team pointed out that we’d potentially missed a few things and asked for further substantiation of our estimates. It turned out that unlike MITTENS, where sexual reproduction doesn’t speed up the fixation process, it does reduce the likelihood of developing genomic cancer due to something called recombination that does not occur in the bacteria. So in the second paper, Strong Selection and the Improbability of Punctuated Equilibrium, we built the formal mathematical model — and discovered that the cancer hazard, while real and validated by our simulations, is actually the secondary problem.

The primary problem is obvious and more fundamental: PE’s core mechanism simply can’t do what is required of it. When you calculate the minimum selection coefficient required to fix enough new mutations to produce a recognizably new species within PE’s proposed time window, the numbers are either a) too high to be biologically real, or b) they’re low enough to be achievable only because you’ve reduced the amount of evolutionary change to something trivially small, something like a slightly different fur color, not a new species. Therefore, the PE hypothesis is caught between a rock and a hard place: either the mechanism does enough to matter, in which case it requires selection intensities that don’t exist in nature, or it operates within realistic selection paramenters, in which case it doesn’t produce speciation. The two abstracts follow:

Punctuated Equilibrium and the Hypermutation Hazard: The Risks of Strong Selection Pressure

The Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) subjected twelve Escherichia coli populations to sustained strong selection for over 60,000 generations. Six of the twelve populations independently evolved hypermutator phenotypes through destruction of DNA repair systems: four via mismatch repair defects (mutS/mutL) and two via oxidative damage repair defects (mutT). This is not a side effect. It is a central result: intense selection pressure repeatedly and independently favors the cannibalization of genome-maintenance infrastructure. Convergent evidence from clinical microbiology confirms the pattern is general: Pseudomonas aeruginosa under chronic selection in cystic fibrosis lungs shows hypermutator colonization at 36% patient incidence, while pathogenic E. coli and Salmonella under selection for host invasion show mutator incidence of 1–4%. Direct mammalian evidence establishes the cost: biallelic mismatch repair failure in humans, the homologous pathway, causes Constitutional Mismatch Repair Deficiency (CMMRD), producing cancer at greater than 90% incidence by age 20. The classical mechanism proposed for punctuated equilibrium, peripatric speciation in small, isolated founder populations under intense selection, requires precisely the conditions empirically documented to produce hypermutation, and specifically invokes the small-population dynamics that can expose heterozygous repair deficiency as homozygous repair deficiency. This paper identifies what appears to be a previously unrecognized hazard in PE’s proposed mechanism: the selection regime it requires operates in the same parameter space where DNA repair destruction is empirically favored.

Strong Selection and the Improbability of Punctuated Equilibrium

Punctuated equilibrium (PE) posits that speciation occurs rapidly in small, geographically isolated founder populations under strong selection. We ask two questions. First, can PE’s mechanism achieve its claimed adaptive throughput, the fixation of enough alleles to produce speciation-level morphological change within the punctuation window, given the reproductive and population-genetic constraints of the organisms in question? Second, does the peripatric bottleneck PE requires expose founder populations to the hypermutation hazard identified in Day and Athos (2026c)?

For the first question, we derive the minimum selection coefficient required as a function of the number of required new hard sweeps K_new, the available generations T, and the effective population size N_e, after granting reasonable contributions from standing variation and parallelism. The parameter space divides into three zones: a SAFE zone (s < 0.01) where mutator hitchhiking is improbable but adaptive capacity is limited to fewer than 10 fixations in 10,000 generations and is insufficient for speciation; a DANGER zone (0.01 ≤ s ≤ 0.10) that PE must occupy for meaningful fixation rates but where mutator dynamics become relevant; and an IMPOSSIBLE zone (s > 0.10) where no empirical evidence supports sustained selection across multiple loci. A sensitivity analysis across the standing-variation fraction and parallelism factor reveals a structural dilemma: every parameter combination that produces speciation-level morphological change requires selection coefficients in the DANGER zone or higher, and the combinations that reach safety do so only by reducing the model to standing-variation frequency shifts and a handful of new mutations, which is not PE as originally proposed by Eldredge and Gould.

For the second question, a Wright-Fisher simulation of 50,000 replicate founder events validates the published 2.3% per-event probability of producing CMMRD-equivalent homozygotes at N = 100. The risk is front-loaded, amplified by inbreeding at small population sizes, and robust to purifying selection. Across the number of founder events PE requires to explain cladogenesis, the cumulative probability of encountering the hazard approaches certainty. This pathway operates through founder sampling and drift alone and does not depend on mutator hitchhiking.

We examine mutator hitchhiking as a potential additional pathway and find that for sexual vertebrates with normal meiotic recombination, per-sweep hitchhiking probabilities are very low, orders of magnitude below the parameterized upper bounds. The hitchhiking pathway remains a genuine concern for organisms with limited recombination but is not load-bearing for the paper’s conclusions. The throughput constraint and the CMMRD homozygosity pathway are independently sufficient.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Road to Skepticism

A section of a rather long interview by William Dembski, a Founding and Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and a Distinguished Fellow with the Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Bill: When did you first become skeptical of neo-Darwinism? Was there a particular book, calculation, empirical result, or conversation that made you think the standard account might be mathematically inadequate? Was there a point in life when you were perfectly content to accept whatever the reigning theory of evolution happened to be?

Vox: After reading all of Richard Dawkins’s books as part of my preparation for writing The Irrational Atheist in 2008. I could not believe how stupid and incompetent the man is. He’s a wonderful writer, which is the reason no one ever notices what a vapid cretin he is or that most of his arguments aren’t even coherent. Then, after reading all of Daniel Dennett’s work, I realized that the evolutionists have no idea what they’re even trying to prove or how to prove it. I summed up the entirety of the evolutionist case thanks to Dennett’s core argument: “you can believe biologists because physicists get very accurate results.” All that evolutionary biology has ever amounted to is butterfly collectors telling fairy stories under the guise of stolen scientific valor.

Bill: What were the strongest arguments in favor of evolution that you encountered before offering your own critique of it? I’ve been able to trace blog posts by you critical of neo-Darwinism on Vox Popoli to 2012. Was this when you first officially weighed in on evolutionary theory?

Vox: I never really thought about it much outside of the usual high school biology class. I was offered the opportunity to debate evolution and “be taught about it” by a science teacher who was also an evolution blogger. They love to offer to teach you. And when it became clear that he didn’t understand why “what is the average rate of evolution by natural selection” was not only a relevant question, but an absolutely necessary one, I began to notice that evolutionists are hopelessly innumerate. I mean, sure, it’s a difficult question, but by definition, there is absolutely an answer. I’ve since learned that evolutionists don’t understand the concept of an “average rate.” In fact, some of them with PhDs don’t even understand the concept of “average.” I’m not kidding.

Bill: Did your skepticism begin with natural selection, with universal common descent, with the neutral theory of molecular evolution, with philosophical naturalism more generally, or some combination of these, or none of the above? How did those concerns become connected in your thinking?

Vox: Pure natural selection. I’m not even sure what “common descent” means. I don’t think you would believe how little this stuff interests me, how unfamiliar I am with the normal buzzwords, or how obviously irrelevant the entire traditional evolutionary debate is.

Bill: Which evolutionary theorists do you regard as the strongest or most intellectually serious opponents of your position? Which do you think are fakers or poseurs?

Vox: JBS Haldane was a serious guy. EO Wilson was smart, but got too caught up in the weeds. R.A. Fisher had the right ideas, more or less, but he focused on mutations instead of fixations and set the entire field off on the wrong direction for a century as a result. Kimura was onto something, but he didn’t have the courage of his own mathematics. Ernst Mayr was a faker and a poser. Dawkins is just an innumerate moron; he genuinely believes his own nonsense. But I tend to enjoy his books; he could have been a great science fiction writer.

Bill: Is there any major aspect of contemporary evolutionary theory that you came to appreciate and embrace more fully while writing your two recent books on the topic?

Vox: I very much respect the work that the genetic scientists are doing on the various genomes. I suspect they know perfectly well what the implications and inevitable consequences of their work are, but they keep their mouths very carefully shut in order to avoid upsetting the academic apple cart.

Bill: You often use neo-Darwinism as the principal name for the theory you oppose. What exactly do you include under that term: random mutation and natural selection, the broader modern synthesis, neutral and nearly neutral evolution, or every naturalistic account of evolutionary change?

Vox: I use the term correctly. Most evolutionists don’t. Darwinism is natural selection. The Modern Synthesis is Darwinism + Mendelian genetics as per Mayr et al. Neutral and Nearly Neutral Theory are not compatible at all with Neo-Darwinism, were developed more than a decade after the Modern Synthesis, and I describe the attempt to put it all in one big Darwinian box as the Postmodern Poly-thesis. Creationists have already defeated Neo-Darwinism, which is why evolutionists immediately retreat to Kimura and various forms of neutral substitution now. Natural selection proper is dead and they know it. Even Dawkins talks about Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection now.

Bill: Which of those claims does MITTENS directly address, and which require additional arguments?

Vox: All of them. Probability Zero covers about nine stages of the evolutionist retreat from Moscow to Paris. So far, they’re just starting to touch upon stage three. The only thing that requires more work is refining the actual numbers more precisely, because the original reporting by Barrick in 2009 was sloppy and inconsistent and the later work by Goode in 2017 wasn’t quite there yet. I’ve broken their collective data down in detail in the MITTENS 3.0 paper and the detailed results are much more clear than in their papers.

Read the whole thing there. As a bonus, he also posted Chapter Six of Probability Zero, the chapter devoted to the 1966 Wistar Symposium that was so catastrophic for the biologists, at the end of the interview. If you haven’t read it yet, you really should.

DISCUSS ON SG

Climbing the Ladder

Arktoons has officially passed Tapas as the #2 Internet toons site. Not because we’ve grown spectacularly, but because Tapas was just shut down by its new owners:

Tapas, a popular North American comic and web novel hosting site, is shutting down. According to a report on BigGo Finance, Tapas is “a drag on earnings” for parent company Kakao Entertainment, a South Korean media company which purchased the platform in 2021 for roughly $800 million. BigGo Finance reports that Tapas was home to over “100,000 titles” from “75,000 creators” and had amassed over “10 million cumulative registered users,” many of whom are upset right now.

On social media, readers and creators alike are distressed at the news, partly because it hasn’t been officially communicated by Tapas itself. Tapas shutting down will leave many comics and writers without a place to host their work and without a potential source of revenue. Like other comic platforms, Tapas makes its money from ads and selling currency used to unlock premium stories. Creators, in turn, get a cut of that ad revenue and any currency spent on their stories.

In the Tapas Discord server, users are sharing new places to house their work while a number of commenters on social media are using the event to emphasize the need for creatives to self-host their work, as well as sharing resources to get them started. However, the appeal of Tapas was that it was a centralized location for users to access their favorite works. When the service ends, a lot of readers simply aren’t going to follow every individual creator to wherever they end up.

“I have 7k subscribers and over a half million views on Tapas,” wrote PerfectSerenad3, author of the Lucifer’s Ace comic on Tapas. “Just gonna go ‘poof’.”

Certainly those creators are welcome to come to Arktoons. It probably wouldn’t be the worst idea for the Arktoons team to reach out to some of them. I haven’t had much to do with it myself in quite some time, but it’s been quietly chugging along with a competent team and now has 7,809 episodes and 17,319,251 views.

In fact, it occurs to me that as we’re preparing the launch of Castalia Unlimited, there is no reason we shouldn’t introduce a new text series or two from our new sets of translations. It would certainly be a nice way to show off some of our first-ever English translations. And it would certainly be appropos in light of the fact that we originally stole the idea for them from Tapas in the first place.

Share your thoughts on what you’d most like to see in a text-with-pictures series on Arktoons, The Secret Scrolls of Naruto, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or one of our other new translations?

DISCUSS ON SG

MITTENS 3.0

This is it. This is the .50 caliber Desert Eagle that replaces the original 9mm Glock used to put down evolutionary biology. I got a little tired of dealing with everyone picking at various minor details that were difficult to ascertain precisely from the published papers, like the exact average rate of e. coli fixations over the 40,000 50,000 60,000 generations, and instead of trying to sort through the opaque summaries provided by the authors of the three related papers, I sent Athos to the repository and had him crunch the numbers directly. It turned out there were a number of problems with the published methodology, both in terms of how the first two studies overcounted “fixations” as well as the way none of them actually reported the precise averages due to various complications and unexpected developments across the 12 various populations. Moreover, the latter two studies contained data for 10k and 20k more generations than the original 40k in the 2009 paper.

The primary cause of the complications was the fact that half of the 12 populations being sequenced experienced a mutation that broke a genetic repair mechanism and introduced a “hypermutation” that wildly increased the number of bacterial mutations and increased the speed of the subsequent fixations to 78 generations per fixation. However, these hypermutations a) never happened in humans or the other Great Apes and b) would kill off a species in the wild by rapidly degrading the genome by flooding it with deleterious mutations. It is quite literally cancer of the genome. This is why those populations were not included in the original summaries or the final calculations, and is probably why the various scientists were a little coy with the numbers they reported in their papers.

Nevertheless, the final results were very much in line with what we’ve come to expect. And in order to deal with all the “but what about” nonsense, I’ve been careful to point out how the LTTE already incorporates every single evolutionary mechanism to which the evolutionists have been appealing save one trivial one that is impossible to incorporate due to the clonal nature of the bacteria utilized. And even the most inveterate Darwinian will freely acknowledge that ILS is not going to close the observed gap. As I mentioned in the previous post, the natural selection-only rate is now confirmed to average 4,615 generations per fixation, whereas the all-mechanisms rate averages 1,322 generations per fixation.

Abstract

The neo-Darwinian synthesis has never been subjected to a comprehensive empirical audit in which every proposed evolutionary mechanism operates simultaneously under observation. Defenders of the theory have constructed what we term the post-Darwinian polythesis: a shifting constellation of supplementary mechanisms — neutral drift, parallel fixation, supermutation, hitchhiking, epistasis, clonal interference, compensatory mutation — each invoked ad hoc to answer a specific mathematical objection, but never tested collectively. The Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) with Escherichia coli, now in its fourth decade, is the only experiment in existence where every one of these mechanisms operates simultaneously under controlled conditions. We analyze the total fixation throughput of the LTEE using two independent public datasets: Tenaillon et al. 2016 (clone-pair sequencing through 50,000 generations, 264 genomes) and Good et al. 2017 (metagenomic frequency trajectories through 60,000 generations). The resulting average for non-hypermutational populations is 1,322 generations per fixation at 60,000 generations. Applied to the human-chimpanzee divergence, the shortfall is 1,075,000-fold, and three independent lines of genomic evidence confirm that no hypermutational phase ever occurred on the human lineage. The post-Darwinian polythesis fails comprehensively by six orders of magnitude under the most favorable experimental conditions ever constructed.

1. The Post-Darwinian Polythesis

The original MITTENS framework posed a simple question: given the fastest fixation rate ever observed in any organism under any conditions, is there enough time for natural selection to produce the genetic divergence documented between humans and chimpanzees? The answer was no, by a factor exceeding one million.

The response from the evolutionary biology community was not a quantitative rebuttal. It was a qualitative one. Rather than demonstrating that the fixation rate used was wrong, which would have required producing a faster observed rate, which they cannot, defenders of the Modern Synthesis reached for a series of supplementary mechanisms. Neutral drift accounts for most substitutions, they argued. Parallel fixation allows many loci to change simultaneously. Hypermutation can accelerate the rate when needed. Hitchhiking carries neutral variants along with beneficial sweeps. Epistatic interactions create synergies. Clonal interference, frequency-dependent selection, and eco-evolutionary dynamics add further dimensions.

Each mechanism was invoked to answer a specific objection. None was invoked alongside the others. No calculations of their effects, individual or cumulative, were ever attempted or provided. No efforts were made to show how these various mechanisms were sufficient to supply the observed shortfall.

We call this collection of ad hoc supplementary mechanisms the post-Darwinian polythesis. It is “post-Darwinian” because each mechanism either supplements or replaces the core Darwinian claim that natural selection acting on random variation is sufficient to explain observed biological diversity. And it is a “polythesis” rather than a hypothesis because it is not a single testable proposition but a shifting collection of individually unfalsifiable claims, each deployed selectively depending on which mathematical objection is currently on the table.

The polythesis has a characteristic rhetorical structure. When MITTENS demonstrates that sequential fixation cannot fill the timeline, the defender invokes parallel fixation. When the Bernoulli Barrier demonstrates that parallel fixation is probabilistically self-defeating, the defender invokes neutral drift. When neutral theory’s own mathematics are shown to require an even longer timeline than the one it was invoked to rescue, the defender invokes supermutation. When supermutation is shown to produce diminishing returns, the defender returns to parallel fixation. The circle is never closed because the defender never has to run all the mechanisms simultaneously and measure their combined output.

This paper closes the circle.

The Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Escherichia coli was founded by Richard Lenski in 1988 and is now approaching 85,000 generations. It is the only experiment in existence where every mechanism in the polythesis operates simultaneously under direct observation. Beneficial sweeps, neutral hitchhiking, parallel fixation, clonal interference, compensatory mutation, epistatic interactions, hypermutation, frequency-dependent selection, and eco-evolutionary dynamics have all been documented in the LTEE populations. They are not theoretical possibilities invoked ad hoc. They are observed realities operating in concert.

The total fixation throughput of the LTEE is therefore not a measurement of any single mechanism. It is a measurement of all of the evolutionary mechanisms except one running at once, under conditions maximally favorable to rapid evolution: enormous effective population sizes, short generation times, strong selection pressure, no mate-finding costs, no recombination overhead, and an effectively unlimited mutation supply. Whatever number the LTEE produces, it is the empirical ceiling on what evolution can accomplish when every tool in its kit is deployed simultaneously under ideal conditions.

We measured that number. It is not enough. It is not even close to being enough.

You can read the rest or download the PDF at the repository if you are so inclined. And yes, there will be a third edition of PZ as well as a second edition of TFG eventually.

DISCUSS ON SG

Going Down with the Clowns

Switzerland choose NATO and Clown World over neutrality:

Is Switzerland neutral enough? For most citizens, the answer is a clear yes: on Sunday, 70.2% rejected the “neutrality initiative”, which had proposed a stricter definition that would have reduced the government’s ability to sanction countries like Russia. Not one of the 26 cantons came out in favour. Turnout was 47%.

Centre Party Senator Marianne Binder-Keller told SRF on Sunday that the initiative would have led Switzerland into “total isolation” at a time of new security challenges. The result is a signal that the country is “part of the Western, rules-based security architecture, is a partner for cooperation, and participates in sanctions” in cases where international law is breached. Such a stance also serves Swiss security interests, she said.

Neutrality is not total isolation. What neutrality involves is a) not taking sides and b) not pissing off major economic powers.

This unfortunate result was not unexpected. It’s just mildly comical, coming as it does in the aftermath of Nestle having billions in assets seized by Russia simply because the politicians just had to take sides in a war that the “Western rules-based security architecture” was bound to lose as well as that security architecture proving utterly unfit for purpose in its ongoing defeat in the Gulf.

We absolutely know that Switzerland is going to suffer for these asinine policies, just as it has from its previous steps down this path. It abandoned banking privacy and restructured its postal bank just so it could play in the shark-infested waters of Wall Street and lost one of its two banking giants as a result. Now the survivor is threatening to leave the country. It is tying itself to a dying post-WWII order as the rest of the world turns to BRICS when it could have very profitably served as a link between the two. And we all know that the Swiss are going to be terribly shocked when their not-neutrality has serious consequences.

Switzerland has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Washington and Brussels. No doubt it is going to be shocked again when the countries it has chosen to side against, and their economic partners, start treating Switzerland the way Clown World has treated them.

But it could be worse. At least they didn’t sign on for a) a winter march on Moscow or b) a mutual-defense alliance with Taiwan. Yet.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Temperature Rises

It’s not really visible yet, but some of the more credentialed people on both sides of the evolutionary debate are starting to take notice of Probability Zero and MITTENS. And, of course, the usual sort of suspects are, as always, focused on the irrelevant minutia, so I’m having to further refine the argument. Which, of course, only makes it even stronger and more conclusive than before.

Here’s the problem. Biologists are stupid and innumerate, so even when they do the hard work required, they neither analyze it nor report it in a coherent, relevant, and meaningful manner. As I pointed out in Appendix F of the first edition, the 1,600 per generation number was both a) wrong and b) garbage. The problem is that every number reported in the 2009 and 2017 papers are also irrelevant garbage. The 2009 numbers are particularly bad because many of the fixations counted were not actual fixations.

Never mind, of course, that the actual number is almost entirely irrelevant, because there isn’t a bacterial fixation number that will ever make the numbers work. But because I value precision and I am not a biologist, I’ve downloaded the data for all 60,000 generations of the 80,000 generations published – 40k more than Barrick utilized in the 2009 study – and had Athos crunch the data. I’ll put everything in the next MITTENS 3.0 paper, but here are the highlights:

Kimura’s k = μ is mechanistically irrelevant

Kimura’s neutral substitution rate k = μ gives the correct long-run average but the MECHANISM producing neutral fixations on observable timescales is not drift — it’s hitchhiking. With Ne = 3 × 10⁷, drift takes ~30 million generations per neutral fixation. The LTEE ran for 60K generations and accumulated ~20 neutral fixations — all hitchhikers. The drift channel isn’t slow; it’s off.

Supermutation increases noise, not signal

Hypermutation increases clone mutation counts ~19× but total fixation throughput only ~11×, and BENEFICIAL fixation rates don’t increase at all, they actually tend to decrease clonal interference overload. One population (Ara-2) achieved zero fixations despite 100× elevated mutation rate. Supermutation is loading more passengers on the same number of buses. Also, it’s obviously not applicable to humans, because we have no supermutational gene-pairs.

6c. Deceleration is real and expected

Early adaptation is fast due to low-hanging fruit and big-effect mutations. The rate decelerates as easy gains are exhausted. The 30K–40K interval for non-mutators actually goes NEGATIVE. The faster rates from earlier generations cannot be extrapolated to long evolutionary timescales.

The breeding reality principle

Even at the LTEE’s bacterial throughput rate with no recombination costs, no mate-finding, no overlapping generations, and essentially infinite effective population size, the mechanism fails by six orders of magnitude. For organisms with 25-year generation times, small effective populations, sexual reproduction, and limited offpsring, the situation is considerably worse.

The real, updated 60-generation LTTE numbers are:

4,615 generations per beneficial fixation (natural selection)

1,322 generations per all-cause fixation (natural selection + neutral theory + everything else)

DISCUSS ON SG

Corruption in Social Media

Foreign interests attempt to utilize American social media influencers:

Ukraine’s government-backed United24 project offered former US service members thousands of dollars to produce pro-Ukraine videos for American audiences, RT’s America Now has found. The offers targeted veterans whose military backgrounds could make the message seem more credible to viewers.

Host Ben Swann and investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane examined how the project, launched by Vladimir Zelensky in 2022 to raise support for Ukraine, approached former personnel, including special operations veterans with YouTube channels and other media platforms.

According to veterans who reached out to Lane, United24 offered around $10,000 for each video, plus $40,000 in advertising support. There was no stated limit on the number of videos they could make. The project would also provide scripts and guidance, while the veterans would ultimately deliver praise for Ukraine and Zelensky in their own words.

Some creators who agreed to the deal were reportedly creating up to five or six videos a week, making nearly a quarter of a million dollars a month, Lane found. The men who spoke with Lane said they themselves had turned down the money, recognizing that they were being asked to present paid propaganda as their own views.

However, for some, the refusal came with consequences beyond lost income. One veteran, who turned down the offer and later criticized Ukraine for wasting US money on his channel, had people contacting his employer, calling him a Russian agent, and trying to get him fired.

Full disclosure: the only foreign interest that has ever offered any support for me was China’s English language television station. They offered me a show, which in retrospect I probably should have agreed to do. I turned it down, in part because UATV was starting to roll, but also because I didn’t want people trying to to dismiss me as some sort of Chinese shill.

As it turned out, they do that anyhow on the basis of me sharing my observations without any compensation. Of course, it’s a lot different openly doing a show on a network and secretly taking money to advertise someone else’s perspective.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Migration is the Invasion

A word of warning: remigration is very unlikely to be violently unopposed in some of the more heavily invaded states:

France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom are being invaded by entire “divisions” of fighting-age men from hostile nations, many being driven and motivated by a religion based on violent conquest. (~10,000 troops = one division.)

But they are not assembling the way Western military thinkers are accustomed to seeing. There are no bases full of armed men in uniforms, marching with weapons and maneuvering in military vehicles, getting ready to board ships in North Africa or the Middle East.

No, the foreign future fighters are being infiltrated into Europe 10 or 100 at a time, “flying below the radar” of conventional military doctrine. Unseen and apparently unnoticed by European leaders. While Macron and Bernham discuss sending their own conventional military forces to Saudi Arabia, their own nations are being invaded.

The most difficult part of this 5th Gen invasion is transporting entire future brigades and divisions of men, without rousing local fear and anger to the boiling point. Not only must the invasion force be transported across Europe to the English Channel, then provided with dinghies so they can be “rescued” by the traitorous RNLI, they must be continuously fed and housed in former hotels and on military bases. This “troop deployment” is being done in plain sight, finally raising considerable local resentment and resistance.

But make no mistake, when the time is right, probably when nationalist anger results in politicians being elected who are serious about forced “remigration” on a massive scale, then their guns will come out. Compared to transporting, housing and feeding tens of thousands of fighting-age men, arming them will trivial. 2,000 AK-47s will fit in a 20-foot container that can roll down any street on a tip-off truck to be delivered and stored anywhere. Unlike 2,000 men, these containers can sit patiently for years.

When the time comes, the men won’t need military training. Many already have combat experiences in their own wars, and in any event, a man with an IQ above 80 can be shown how to load and fire an AK-47 in a matter of minutes. Their accuracy won’t matter, not at close range against helpless unarmed victims.

Bands armed with such weapons, in nations with unarmed populations, will rampage like rabid wolves among tame sheep. Local police and even militaries will be overwhelmed. These armed bands will be able to commandeer cars and buses at will for transportation. Who will stop them?

No doubt some countries will survive the militarization of the extant invasion better than others. And while some will divide on various grounds, others are winner-takes-all situations. Regardless, it’s quite likely the 5GW is something that the younger generations are going to experience in some way, shape, or form in the next 10 to 20 years.

Migration is war isn’t a metaphor, it’s a tautology.

DISCUSS ON SG

Embracing Survival

Italy finally begins defending itself against invasion:

The Italian government has approved a ban on burqas and niqabs in schools, along with a limit on the number of pupils with limited Italian in some classes. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the measures would improve integration and prevent the formation of “ghetto classes.”

The decree adopted on Thursday prohibits face coverings that prevent identification during school activities. It covers burqas and niqabs, but leaves hijabs, which do not cover the face, unaffected. Violations can bring fines of up to €1,000.

The government has also set a 30% cap in first-year classes for pupils without Italian citizenship.

It’s good to see that European governments are finally beginning to grasp the nature of the problem facing their societies. But until they embrace active, large-scale remigration, all of this is still just prelude. The pendulum has only begun to swing back.

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