Category: Uncategorized

Math Teacher Can’t Math

Another evolutionary retard publicly demonstrates his retardery to the world. This time it’s a math teacher who would obviously fail every single word problem on a math test.

So I’d like to go into the math of Vox day and Will Duffy. Who am I? I am a math teacher. I am a math teacher in secondary education. Now if we take the reasoning of Will Duffy he says f max that’s the total number of genes fixated over a specific period the result that he gets is in the given time frame we could only have [sighs and gasps] 180 genes mutated and changed.

And what is the time period? That’s t div time that is given. That’s 6300,000 sorry 6,300,000 years of evolution divided by the length of a generation. That’s G len here. The length of a generation for humans is 25 years times 400 generations. So he says it takes 1,400 generations to fix one gene.

Okay. So if we make this calculation times one because D is substituted by one we reach the number 180. Devastating results says Will Duffy, we can only fix and mutate one gene 180 genes over a time period of six million years. If we were to follow this reasoning, it would mean it would mean what? For one gene to mutate and fixate. Sorry, it would have to take 25 * 1,400 is 35,000 years for one gene. And [snorts] the reasoning is you can only mutate and fixate another gene when this time period is over. So we have [snorts] 6 300,000 6,300,000 divided by 80. That would mean 35,000 years for one gene to mutate and fixate.

Now the reasoning is wrong. Why? It would mean that if you have the Marathon of New York with 60,000 participants and an average length of 4 hours per marathon. If you would follow this reasoning, it would take on average 240,000 hours for the marathon to end. That’s 10,000 days. And that means 27 years for all the participants to arrive. Of course, that’s not possible. they run parallel. Well, the same goes with mutation and fixation. So that math is clearly uh wrong.

This guy should be fired from his job immediately. He’s obviously incompetent. The math is not wrong because parallel fixation is clearly and specifically included in the calculation. So are sweeps. So is neutral substitution. So are hitchhikers. So is any and every evolutionary mechanism, with the exception of three minor ones.

First to address his idiotic analogy. What he is attempting to do is add up the cumulative time of all 60,000 runners, which is 240,000 hours, and then claim that it is identical to the amount of time it took to televise the marathon. Because the number that was provided is THE AVERAGE RATE PER FIXATION of all the bacteria in all the viable populations all the time. Once more, we see that an evolutionist doesn’t understand what an “average” is. The 1,400 generations per fixation number is analogically identical to the four hours per runner number.

If he simply looked at the LTEE papers, or the data, or my papers, he would know that is true. For example, in 60,000 generations, the Ara-6 population has 35 fixations. Not in serial. That’s the total number that took place in that population over the 60,000 generations. Which is a rate of 1,715 generations per fixation, which the keenly observant will note is even slower than the average rate, which incorporates multiple populations.

Ericka, this guy, and everyone else to whom they are running to try to “correct the math” are amazingly and astonishingly stupid in their ignorant smugness. It’s obvious that this teacher never read my book or my papers. He’s also never read any of the three major LTEE papers. He’s never looked up the raw data upon which those three papers drew. Because he doesn’t even know what the number he’s trying to “correct” represents.

So for all you lazy, ignorant, and smug cretins who still believe in the mathematically impossible fairy tale of evolution, I will type very, very slowly in the hopes that you can somehow follow the facts:

  1. The LTEE runs twelve identical populations of bacteria in parallel from the same ancestor. Every single evolutionary mechanism from natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, hitchhiking, epistasis, compensatory mutation, and frequency-dependent selection, to clonal interference operates simultaneously in all 12 populations for 85,000 generations and counting.
  2. Parallel fixation, the idea that the same beneficial mutation can arise and fix independently in multiple lineages, isn’t just theoretically possible in this setup, it has been directly observed. The LTEE populations have fixed mutations in the same genes, sometimes at the precisely same nucleotide position, in different populations. That’s fixation running parallel in more ways than one.
  3. The only mechanisms the LTEE doesn’t capture are sexual recombination (bacteria don’t have sex), incomplete lineage sorting (which requires a speciation event), and horizontal gene transfer (the populations are maintained in isolation). Of those three, only recombination could even theoretically speed things up, and the reproductive constraints of sexual organisms more than compensate for it in the opposite direction.
  4. When we calculated the LTEE’s total average fixation throughput at 1,322 generations per fixation, that number already includes almost every way evolution can theoretically take place, in parallel, running flat out under ideal conditions, and it still falls short of what’s needed by six orders of magnitude. Note that the maximum speed of natural selection running in parallel alone is 4,615 generations per fixation.

Note: It is worth pointing out that there are now six populations that were running faster than the 1,322 gens/fix rate at the 60,000-generation mark that are omitted from everyone’s calculations. By now, there may be seven or eight. This is not because anyone is hiding evidence that favors of the mathematical viability of evolution, in fact, this evidence will almost certainly prove conclusively that there can be no evolution over 120,000 generations of strong selective pressure, because the reason these populations are mutating faster is that all six have developed genomic cancer. If they weren’t bacteria, all six populations would already be dead. Hence my papers addressing punctuated equilibrium.

I’m not sure what is more pathetic, the fact that these “educators” don’t understand the first thing about what they’re “teaching” or the way in which the people who follow them are incapable of seeing their obvious blunders. Even when warned about where they are wrong, they blithely just plow forward in their admitted ignorance.

iando808: Hi Jan, note that Vox Day claims that Parallel fixation is accounted for (or at least justified to be excluded) in his work, whether you want to pursue that or not. His papers, all written using AI, are available on zenodo — lots of overlapping papers, a dispersed argument so harder to digest. He refuses or is incapable to get his work peer reviewed.

DeDzjang: Oh yeah, he rejects parallel fixation on shaky grounds. But I’m not schooled on this subject. I know babies differ in plusminus 60 genes from their parents. This alone shows mutation runs parallel, maybe not in 1 generation, but surely over a span of 1400 generations (=35 000 years). This number shows up in different independent research papers. There can not be two: babies differ from parents AND there is no parallel mutation. It’s one or the other.

iando808: DeDzjang — a welcome humility, unlike Vox Day who arrogantly assumes he knows more than anyone else…

I don’t arrogantly assume I know more than anyone else, I observably do know considerably more about the subject than any of these people who obviously don’t know anything at all about it, by their own admission. When did I ever reject parallel fixation on any grounds whatsoever? All I did was point out, correctly, that it was already included in the calculation.

And, since a) I don’t have any peers and b) the raw data is available in 500-generation slices, I’m putting together a method to determine what the rate of genuinely serial fixation is just to prevent these morons from being able to claim that a number specifically including parallel fixation is a number that excludes it.

UPDATE: The SERIAL natural selection rate for the LTEE at 60k generations is ~24,500 generations per fixation. I’ll want to dig in a little deeper to be certain of that, but that’s what happens when parallel fixation is excluded.

Note that now their only hope is to argue that human mutations, and absolutely all sexually-reproducing animal mutations, somehow fixate much faster in the wild than mutations appearing in bacteria in a laboratory being intentionally subjected to sustained artificially strong selection pressure reported in the range of s ≈ 0.01. This would be a fascinating trick to see them try to pull off, considering that s = 0.001 is what the scientific literature reports as the mean selection coefficient for beneficial mutations in humans.

DISCUSS ON SG

No One is Ready For It

Sure, the papers on punctuated equilibrium and Kimura’s empty pipeline are going to shake the field of biology to its core. And sure, Castalia Unlimited is going to be the most amazing thing since The Missionaries was first bound in leather and the first Dracula was bound in pigskin at our own bindery. But never before has everything all come together like this. Yes, there is a new mix. Yes, the video is completely out of control. And yes, the funk is deeply evolved.

DISCUSS ON SG

Oligarchs Against Democracy

I don’t think the self-appointed defenders of representative democracy in Germany quite understand that it is them, and not the AfD or “right-wing extremists”, who are the real threat to democracy in Europe.

Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has called for a formal review that could pave the way for a ban on Alternative for Germany (AfD), as the right-wing party leads national polls following major regional election victories.

The push follows the AfD’s sweeping victories in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania earlier this month, where it secured 43.8% and 38.2%, respectively. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered heavy losses, including failing to clear the 5% threshold in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

On Tuesday, SPD parliamentary leaders from the Bundestag, Germany’s state legislatures and the European Parliament wrapped up a two-day summit in Bremen by again labeling the AfD a “right-wing extremist party.” They accused it of threatening democracy “from within” and “normalizing racism.” The push comes as the AfD has opened up a record polling lead over Merz’s CDU/CSU bloc. An INSA survey put the AfD at 29.5%, compared with 19% for the CDU/CSU and just 14.5% for the SPD. 

Let’s get this straight. Democracy is supposedly legitimate because it is based on the will of the people. But if the people want something that the current political elite’s don’t, or if they don’t want something that the elite is forcing on them, then their will has to be opposed and their chosen representatives banned from government.

And this is why Aristotle and Cicero described politics as a circle over time. What the SPD represents is the modern form of oligarchy.

DISCUSS ON SG

No Loans for Basket-Weaving

President Trump announces an end to student loans for make-work university degrees:

President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the Education Department has finalized a rule that will force schools to prove that the loans students are taking out are paying off.

Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music, and cosmetic certification programs will be hit the hardest. For-profit programs will also be hit particularly hard.

First, all student loans should be outlawed and all student loan debt should be forgiven. It’s a predatory scam taking advantage of literal children. And the fact that these loans were being provided to obtain degrees that couldn’t reasonably expected to cover the cost of acquiring them only underlines their predatory nature.

It’s a good first step, but it shouldn’t be the last one.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

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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.

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