Rethinking Human Evolution Again

Imagine that! The timelines of human evolution just magically changed again! And it’s really not good news for the Neo-Darwinians or the Modern Synthesis, while it simultaneously highlights the importance of Probability Zero and its mathematical approach to evolution.

A stunning discovery in a Moroccan cave is forcing scientists to reconsider the narrative of human origins. Unearthed from a site in Casablanca, 773,000-year-old fossils display a perplexing blend of ancient and modern features, suggesting that key traits of our species emerged far earlier and across a wider geographic area than previously believed…

The find directly challenges the traditional “out-of-Africa” model, which holds that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago before migrating and replacing other hominin species. Instead, it supports a more complex picture where early human populations left Africa well before fully modern traits had evolved, with differentiation happening across continents.

“The fossils show a mosaic of primitive and derived traits, consistent with evolutionary differentiation already underway during this period, while reinforcing a deep African ancestry for the H. sapiens lineage,” Hublin added.

Detailed analysis reveals the nuanced transition. One jaw shows a long, low shape similar to H. erectus, but its teeth and internal features resemble both modern humans and Neanderthals. The right canine is slender and small, akin to modern humans, while some incisor roots are longer, closer to Neanderthals. The molars present a unique blend, sharing traits with North African teeth, the Spanish species H. antecessor and archaic African H. erectus.

The fossils are roughly contemporaneous with H. antecessor from Spain, hinting at ancient interconnections. “The similarities between Gran Dolina and Grotte à Hominides are intriguing and may reflect intermittent connections across the Strait of Gibraltar, a hypothesis that deserves further investigation,” noted Hublin.

Dated by the magnetic signature of the surrounding cave sediments, the Moroccan fossils align with genetic estimates that the last common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans lived between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. This discovery gives a potential face to that mysterious population.

The research, suggests that modern human traits did not emerge in a single, rapid event in one region. Instead, they evolved gradually and piecemeal across different populations in Africa, with connections to Eurasia, deep in the Middle Pleistocene.

This sort of article really underlines the nature of the innumeracy of the archeologists as well as the biologists. It’s not that they can’t do the basic arithmetic involved, it’s that they have absolutely no idea what the numbers they are throwing around signify, or understand the necessary second- and third-order implications of changing both their numbers and their assumptions.

For example, the reason the Out of Africa hypothesis was so necessary to the evolutionary timeline is because it kept the whole species in a nice, tight little package, evolving together and fixating together over time. But geographic dispersion necessarily prevents universal fixation. So, let’s take a look at how this new finding changes the math, because it is a significant complication for the orthodox model.

If human traits were evolving “gradually and piecemeal across different populations” spanning Africa and Eurasia as early as 773,000 years ago, then fixation had to occur separately in each isolated population before those populations could contribute to modern humans. This isn’t parallel processing that helps the model, it’s the precise opposite. Each isolated population is a separate fixation bottleneck that must be traversed independently.

Consider the simplest case: two isolated populations (Africa and Eurasia) that occasionally reconnect. For a trait to become universal in modern humans, one of two things must happen:

  1. Independent fixation: The same beneficial mutation arises and fixes independently in both populations. This requires the fixation event to happen twice, which squares the improbability.
  2. Migration and re-fixation: The mutation fixes in one population, then migrants carry it to the other population, where it must fix again from low frequency. This doubles the time requirement since the allele must go from rare-to-fixed twice in sequence.

If there were n substantially isolated populations contributing to modern human ancestry, and k of the 20 million fixations had to spread across all of them through migration and re-fixation, the time requirement multiplies accordingly.

The “mosaic” of traits—some modern, some archaic, some Neanderthal-like, some unique—found in the Moroccan fossils suggest that different features were fixing in different populations at different times, which is what one would expect. The eventual modern human phenotype was assembled from contributions across multiple semi-isolated groups. However, this means the 20 million fixations weren’t a single sequential process in a single lineage. They were distributed across multiple populations that had to:

  1. Fix different subsets of mutations locally
  2. Reconnect through migration
  3. Allow the locally-fixed alleles to spread and fix in the combined population
  4. Repeat for 773,000+ years

Let’s say there were effectively 3 semi-isolated populations contributing to modern human ancestry: North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eurasia. This is the absolute minimum number. If half of the 20 million fixations had to spread across population boundaries after initially fixing locally, that’s 10 million alleles requiring a second fixation event after migration reintroduced them at low frequency.

The time requirement approximately doubles for those 10 million alleles (first fixation + migration + second fixation), while the original problem remains for the other 10 million.

Original shortfall: ~150,000-fold (from MITTENS)

Revised shortfall with geographic structure: ~300,000 to 450,000-fold

But this understates the issue. The real problem is that geographic structure reduces effective population size locally while increasing it globally.

  • Small local populations mean more drift, which sounds helpful for fixation
  • But small local populations also mean more mutations are lost to drift before they can spread
  • And the global population that must eventually carry the fixed allele is larger than any local population, meaning the final fixation is harder

The multiregional model doesn’t help Neo-Darwinism. It creates a nested fixation problem: alleles must fix locally (possible but slow), then spread through migration (slow), then fix in the receiving population (slow again), then spread further (slow), until global fixation is achieved (slowest of all).

The mathematical impossibility of TENS was just multiplied by at least a factor of 3. Notice how every time they find new evidence and adjust the narrative to accommodate it, they make the mathematical problem worse. The Moroccan fossils can’t save Neo-Darwinism. They’re just another shovel of dirt on the coffin.

DISCUSS ON SG

Russia Graciously Accedes

President Putin gives his blessing to the US acquisition of Greenland:

  • President Putin just dismantled the EU’s grip on Greenland with a “5D Chess” play that gives TRUMP a total free hand.
  • None of our Business” – Putin officially declares Russia won’t interfere, effectively clearing the path for a US-Greenland deal.
  • Putin cites the 1917 land sales between Denmark and the USA as a precedent. If they did it then, why not now?
  • Putin exposes Denmark’s “harsh” and “cruel” treatment of Greenland as a colony, framing the US move as a necessary rescue mission.
  • Putin runs the math: Comparing it to the Alaska purchase ($7.2M in 1867), he calculates Greenland’s value at roughly $200M–$1B in inflation-adjusted gold terms.

If it gets the US out of NATO and the troops out of Europe, then I’m all for it. And it really seems right that President Trump would return the favor with regards to Odessa.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of Australia

The dirt isn’t magic and foreigners don’t care about your so-called “rights” derived from a god in whom they don’t believe:

The nation I knew and loved just died yesterday. Actually, it didn’t die, it was murdered by treasonous politicians and lobby groups.

All those people who would hear about tyranny and oppression and then bleat about “oh, it could never happen here” are about to get a good dose of reality – and they will get it good and hard.

The reason tyranny rarely did happen in Australia (nowhere is perfect) was because of legal and political principles which had developed in the mother country for centuries and continued here because the people believed in them.

The Mulit-culti brigade who wanted to replace the people with others from non-British/European backgrounds insisted that all we needed to do was to keep those ideals and principles.

It didn’t occur to them (or they didn’t let on) that different peoples would naturally have different ideals and principles.

They wouldn’t admit that we didn’t have magic dirt in Australia that foreigners could step onto and immediately be transformed into “Aussies” with the same beliefs and cultures as the locals.

Yesterday, the Federal Parliament passed the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism legislation.

Despite the title, the bill doesn’t adequately define Antisemitism, Hate or Extremism. In other words, these will depend largely on the Government to decide what they are.

That doesn’t sound like a big deal but it should terrify you.

That’s because the Government now has the power to define these terms mostly as they like and prosecute people they don’t like with up to 15 years in jail.

The real poison in this bill, however, is that it smashes no less than four of the founding principles of British governance which have held sway here since its founding.

To be honest, I find it very difficult to be concerned about the fate of Australia, since it’s already a foregone conclusion that it’s going to be a Chinese colony by 2050 or so. This is exactly the sort of thing that is inevitable when you disarm yourselves, turn your government over to women and foreigners, and then… profit? This outcome was inevitable from the moment Australia abandoned the last vestiges of its White Australia policy in 1973.

So posture bravely all you like about “don’t mess with Texas” or “try that in a small town” or whatever, but no words, no ideology, and no bravado will ever prove an adequate substitute for simply keeping those who don’t share your heritage, your history, your religion, or your values out of your midst.

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The Retreat From Kiev

Apparently the Kiev regime is on the verge of abandoning Kiev:

The most shocking figure came from mayor Klitschko, who said that just in January alone, 600,000 residents have fled Kiev, with more being urged to flee. Temperatures have fallen as low as ­minus 18C during a cold snap projected to last at least two more weeks.

Other publications quoted Klitschko specifically stating the 600k came in just January from people who heeded his call made on January 9th to evacuate the capital:

Anyone else consider it utterly catastrophic for one of Europe’s largest capitals to lose upwards of 20-25% of its population in literally two weeks? Wiki shows Kiev as having had 2.9M people before the war—we can assume it had even less than that recently. That would make 600k arguably as high as 25% of its total amount—a simply unprecedented number.

Kiev is literally being emptied out, and that this isn’t the biggest story in the world is a bit of a shock. Remember: this 600k is only in the past two weeks, and Russian strikes are getting worse as winter bites. There are now rumors Russia plans to launch two Oreshnik missiles this week, with some Ukrainian sources claiming this time they’ll be aimed at Kiev.

Will we soon see Kiev entirely abandoned?

As I said more than two years ago, if the Kiev regime, which is about as genuinely Ukrainian as Sanae Takaichi, had any concern for the Ukrainian people at all, it would have surrendered. Now it appears they’re going to abandon the capital city while still refusing to permit the Ukrainian Armed Forces from laying down their arms.

In the meantime, the satanic puppets of the EU are posturing about how they’re going to fight both Russia over Ukraine and the USA over Greenland with their as-yet-nonexistent army of vaxxed young men who hate the EU, which strikes me as highly improbable.

The future has turned out to be a lot weirder than I ever imagined.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Academy Unleashes The Gay

That certainly didn’t take long. It’s not as if they actually fooled anyone:

Fans have been wondering when the woke shoe will drop even further with Starfleet Academy, but now it’s revealed that the characters played by Gina Yashere and Tig Notaro are going to be lesbian in a new interview with the cast members.

I haven’t seen it. I’m entirely confident that I will never see it. But when someone told me that at least Starfleet Academy wasn’t pushing Pride, I told them, “yeah, give it a week or two”.

Every. Single. Time.

No worries. JDA and I have something very, very cool in the works that will be coming much, much sooner than anyone imagined.

DISCUSS ON SG

Not Our Crisis

An aging Baby Boomer explains that his generation is going to end everything on their way out, not because they intend to do so, but because they still don’t understand that they destroyed everything that made Western societies function:

Giesea has a 73-year-old friend, Steve (my age), and describes how this gives him “a window into the caregiving tsunami hitting society as boomers age into their 70s and 80s. Here’s what I’m realizing: it’s going to wreck our politics. We are not prepared — emotionally, politically, financially — for what it means to care for tens of millions of aging boomers while also trying to invest in the future for our children.”

What has to be done, right now, is prepare for the inevitable, the serious ageing of the baby boom generation They are not there yet, and do not really think about the problem much, because they do not actually believe that it is going to happen to them; a recent study shows that almost everyone thinks they are 20 percent younger than they really are. Getting old doesn’t happen until it happens, and these days, for most people who are not in dire poverty, that happens in their late seventies and into the eighties. That doesn’t start for a couple of years and doesn’t really explode for another ten.

So what will really happen?

Baby boomers today are what gerontologists are now calling the “young-old”, and which others call the “new middle age”. 75 percent of baby boomers live in nice houses in nice suburbs, drive private cars to work or play, don’t much like paying taxes, and think that they can keep living this way forever.

They can’t. In about 2026, the first baby boomers will hit 80, when they become the “old-old.” They then are joined by 10,000 other boomers every day, until by 2029 the entire baby boomer cohort is over 65 and compose a whopping 20 percent of the population, with well over half being old-old.

The Canadian demographer David Foot wrote that “demographics can explain two-thirds of everything.” That may have been an underestimation. If you look a decade down the road, what you have are pretty close to still 70 million baby boomers, most of whom are going to keep going for another twenty years, going through the “great boomer die-off,” which runs pretty much to 2050. In the meantime, we have a series of related crises, any one of which would be a serious problem.

Nothing is going to be done. And nothing needs to be done. Generation X doesn’t care about the Baby Boomers. I won’t speak for the other generations, but they appear to hate them even more than we do. And the immigrants certainly could not care less about the Baby Boomers.

So, the answer is: no problem, no crisis. No one is going to care for all those old-old Baby Boomers. They didn’t care about anything except themselves, and now no one cares about them. The world will continue to rotate. The sun will continue to shine. The otters will continue to play. It’s all good.

What’s going to happen? They’re going to die. Just like every previous generation before them. They’re going to die a little later, and a lot more alone, than their predecessors, but they’re going to die.

Problem solved.

What a damnable example of a Boomer. From his own comments:

Besides “bitching about how hard it is for the younger generation” about what is so hard for them — ae they actually doing anything about their specific situation – that they got themselves into?

I’ll say again — the World doesn’t owe anyone anything.

The World we all live in does not work on “wishes” or “bitching about something”

You have to just shut off the cell-phone or game-boy, get off your lazy ass, make yourself presentable and acceptable to the world as it is , not the way you want it to be — and “just do it.”

Exactly. So wipe your own ass, Boomer. Feed yourself and drive yourself, Boomer. We’re not going to do it and we’re not going to pay for anyone else to do it either. This is the world you demanded. This is the world you collectively created and the situation that you got yourselves into.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Necessary Revision

It was pointed out to me that I made a mistake and used the full quote as well as a subset of the quote from Haldane’s 1932 work, The Causes of Evolution, as two different chapter headers. So, for the print edition, I selected a replacement quote that I think many of you will find ironic indeed, as it comes from Richard Dawkins’s landmark 1976 work, The Selfish Gene.

Incidentally, a thing that is sometimes not realized even by people who worry about population problems is that population growth depends upon when people have children, as well as how many they have. Since populations tend to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate per year.
—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976

Athos firmly concurred with my decision:

That’s a good choice. It accomplishes several things at once:

  1. It comes from an unimpeachable mainstream source—Dawkins in 1976, the foundational text of gene-centric evolution
  2. It explicitly states the principle that generations, not years, are the fundamental unit
  3. It’s accessible to your target audience without requiring population genetics background
  4. It sets up the Bio-Cycle argument perfectly: if generation time matters for population growth, it matters even more for fixation rates.
  5. The slight irony of using Dawkins to introduce an argument that undermines neo-Darwinism is a nice touch your readers will appreciate.

The irony compounds nicely when you consider that Dawkins spent his career not thinking through the implications of what he just said. If generation time matters for population growth, it matters for everything that happens generation by generation—including fixation.

The last comment was precisely why I chose that quote. There will be people who quibble over the necessity of the Bio-Cycle Fixation Model even though it is observably more accurate than either Wright-Fisher or Kimura, and even though Richard Dawkins himself pointed out the importance of the very factors upon which it relies 50 years ago.

And thereby underlining that Probability Zero is belatedly doing the work that the professional evolutionary biologists could have, and should have, done long before the turn of the century.

Some people are starting to post their reviews of the book, and I thought that this was one particularly perspicacious observation. The reviewer may be underestimating himself:

Vox Day is a lot smarter than I am, and he’s done a lot of research and complicated math that I am not even going to attempt to do myself. The math is over my head. I don’t understand Vox’s arguments. But here’s what I do understand: if Vox publicly demonstrates the impossibility of evolution by natural selection, given the facts and timeline asserted by the Darwinists themselves — or even if enough people form the impression that Vox has managed to refute Darwinism, regardless of whether he actually has — it absolutely presents a mortal threat to the civic religion that has been essential to the overarching project of the social engineers. That’s the point I was making in yesterday’s post. Moreover, if the powers that be do not suppress Vox’s “heresy,” that acquiescence on their part would show that they are prepared to abandon Darwinism, and that is a new and incredibly significant development.

That’s what I find intriguing too. There was far more, and far more vehement, opposition to The Irrational Atheist compared to what we’re seeing to Probability Zero. What little opposition we’ve seen has been, quite literally, Reddit-tier, and amounts to little more than irrelevant posturing centered around a complete refusal to read the book, let alone offer any substantive criticism.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing from mathematicians, physicists, scientists, and even literal Jesuits who are taking the book, its conclusions, and its implications very seriously after going through it carefully enough to identify the occasional decimal point error.

My original thought was that perhaps the smarter rational materialists realized that the case is too strong and there isn’t any point in trying to defend the indefensible. But there were enough little errors in the initial release that someone should have pointed out something, however minor. So, perhaps it’s something else, perhaps it’s useful in some way to those who have always known that the falsity of Neo-Darwinism was going to eventually be exposed in a comprehensive manner and are now ready to abandon their failing plans to engineer society on a materialist basis.

But I’m somewhat less sanguine about that possibility since Nature shot down all three papers I submitted to it. Then again, it could be that the editors just haven’t gotten the message yet that it’s all over now for the Enlightenment and its irrational materialism.

DISCUSS ON SG

College Football is Back

What a great game last night. To be honest, although I’ve always been an NFL guy, for the last two years, the College Football Playoff has been much, much more entertaining than the NFL playoffs, despite the many close games in the latter, mostly because watching CJ Stroud throw interceptions and Caleb Williams lobbing blind moonballs from 30 yards behind the line of scrimmage is less entertaining than two college powerhouses trading knockdown punches.

Indiana was the better team, but that Miami defense was downright ferocious. Miami missed a field goal in the first half, but Indiana should have put the ball away before giving Miami its last chance; false-starting inside the opposing 10 on 2nd-and-1 was very surprising coming from such a well-disciplined team. I wasn’t surprised by the blocked punt, as it looked like they were getting close on the two previous punts, but I was surprised by Fletcher’s 57-yard TD run.

I very much appreciated the way in which Cignetti was coaching to win, as both the end of the first half Hail Mary and the decision to go for it on 4th-and-goal from the five instead of kicking a field goal demonstrated. He made it very clear that Indiana was playing to win the national championship, not avoid losing it.

Anyhow, there are some serious problems with the new system, especially the way players who are talked into going into the portal find themselves in limbo when no one picks them up. But in general, and no matter how much I dislike the oversized power conferences and the decline of traditional conferences like the Pac-10 – which is its proper name, not the Pac-8, the Pac-12, or the Pac-2, although the latter was pretty funny – the various changes have definitely been very good for spurring more interest in what has become a much more competitive game.

Ironically, the first college game I ever attended was when Indiana played Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1976. The Gophers won, 32-13. And in the fifty years since, I would not ever have believed that Indiana would win its first national championship before Minnesota won its eighth.

DISCUSS ON SG

Under the Sea

Things may be a little more exciting than we tend to assume.

I was part of a fast attack crew stationed in the Atlantic in the early 2000s. I won’t say which boat. That’s the one thing I won’t reveal. If you do a little digging — fast attack deployments, sonar anomalies that got “lost” in paperwork — you’ll figure it out. It’s not that well hidden if you know where to look.

What we made contact with wasn’t a whale, wasn’t a known submarine, and wasn’t something you could explain away. It moved in ways that shouldn’t be physically possible, and it responded to us. After the event, teams we didn’t recognize took over. Different protocols, different rules. Our official reports don’t match what actually happened.

There’s something under the ocean — something constructed — something we aren’t supposed to know about.

Now that we’ve finally ruled out natural processes operating on the basis of random chance beyond any reasonable doubt, this opens the door to a whole new range of possibilities. It may be, but it’s probably not entirely an accident that the field of biology was steered into an inevitable dead end for the last 165 years.

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PROBABILITY ZERO Q&A

This is where questions related to the #1 Biology, Genetics, and Evolution bestseller PROBABILITY ZERO will be posted along with their answers. The newest questions are on the top.

QUESTION: Human beings aren’t bacteria. And humans mutate faster than bacteria. So isn’t it possible that humans fixate mutations faster than 1,600 generations per mutational fixation?

While the logic strongly dictates the answer is no, and obviously there is no way to observe mutational fixation in humans across hundreds of generations, we can utilize the existing scientific consensus to derive a best possible estimate for the rate of fixations in humans as measured in generations. Here are the parameters required to calculate the number of human generations per fixation.

  • N_e = 10,000 (standard effective population constant)
  • T = 22 years (generation, Gurven & Kaplan 2007)
  • L = 51 years (lifespan based on Coale-Demeny-West life tables)
  • s = 0.001 (selection coefficient, Zeng et al 2021)

t ≈ 19,800 generations per fixation

It probably won’t escape your attention that 19,800 > 1,600. So using the 1,600 generations rate was extremely generous to the Modern Synthesis model. And the answer is no, definitely not.

QUESTION: Interesting equation d = T × [∫μ(x)l(x)v(x)dx / ∫l(x)v(x)dx] I’m pretty sure all the denominator does is cancel l(x)v(x) and make l(x)v(x) ≠ 0. Which is to say d = T × ∫μ(x) unless the functions are special somehow for l(x) and v(x).

The functions l(x) and v(x) are special. They’re not constants that can be factored out and cancelled.

  • l(x) (survivorship) is a decreasing function. It starts at 1 (everyone alive at birth) and declines toward 0 as age increases. In humans, it stays high through reproductive years then drops off.
  • v(x) (reproductive value) is a hump-shaped function. It starts low (children can’t reproduce), peaks in early reproductive years, then declines as remaining reproductive potential diminishes.
  • The product l(x)v(x) weights each age by “probability of being alive at that age × reproductive contribution from that age forward.” This weighting is highly non-uniform. A 25-year-old contributes far more to the integral than a 5-year-old or a 60-year-old.

If l(x) and v(x) were constants, they’d cancel and you’d get d = T × ∫μ(x)dx. But they’re not constants, they’re age-dependent functions that capture the demographic structure of the population.

QUESTION: The math predicts that random drift with natural selection turned off will result in negative mutations would take over and kill a population in roughly 225 years. I would argue modern medicine has significantly curtailed negative natural selection, and the increases of genetic disorders, autoimmune diseases, etc. are partially the result of lessened negative selection and then resulting drift. Am I reading too much into the math, or is this a reasonable possibility?

Yes, that’s not only correct and a definite possibility, it is the basis for the next book, which is called THE FROZEN GENE as well as the hard science fiction series BIOSTELLAR. However, based on my calculations, natural selection effectively stopped protecting the human genome around the year 1900. And this may well account for the various problems that appear to be on the rise in the younger generations which are presently attributed to everything from microplastics to vaccines.

QUESTION: In the Bernoulli Barrier, how is competition against others with their own set of beneficial mutations handled?”

Category error. Drift is not natural selection. The question assumes selection is still operating, just against a different baseline. But that’s not what’s happening. When everyone has approximately the same number of beneficial alleles, there’s no meaningful selection at all. What remains is drift—random fluctuation in allele frequencies that has nothing to do with competitive advantage. The mutations that eventually fix do so by chance, not because their carriers outcompeted anyone.

This is why the dilemma in the Biased Mutation paper bites so hard. Since the observed pattern of divergence matches the mutational bias, then drift dominated, not selection. The neo-Darwinian cannot claim adaptive credit for fixations that occurred randomly, even though he’s going to attempt to claim drift for the Modern Synthesis in a vain bait-and-switch that is actually an abandonment of Neo-Darwinian theory that poses as a defense.

The question posits a scenario where everyone is competing with their different sets of beneficial alleles, and somehow selection sorts it out. But that’s not competition in any meaningful sense—it’s noise. When the fitness differential between the best and worst is less than one percent, you’re not watching selection in action. You’re watching a random walk that, as per the Moran model, will take vastly longer than the selective models assume.

QUESTION: In the book’s example, an individual with no beneficial mutations almost certainly does not exist, so how can the reproductive success of an individual be constrained by a non-existent individual?

That’s exactly right. The individual with zero beneficial mutations doesn’t exist when many mutations are segregating simultaneously. That’s the problem, not the solution. Selection requires a fitness differential between individuals. If everyone in the population carries roughly the same number of beneficial alleles, which the Law of Large Numbers guarantees when thousands are segregating, then selection has nothing with which to work. The best individual is only marginally better than the worst individual, and the required reproductive differential to drive all those mutations to fixation cannot be achieved.

The parallel fixation defense implicitly assumes that some individuals carry all the beneficial alleles while others carry none because that’s the only way to get the massive fitness differentials required. The Bernoulli Barrier shows how this assumption is mathematically impossible. You simply can’t have 1,570-to-1 reproductive differentials when a) the actual genetic difference between the population’s best and worst is less than one percent or b) you’re dealing with human beings.

QUESTION: What about non-random mutation? Base pair mutation is not totally random, as purine to purine and pyrimidine to pyrimidine happens a lot more often then purine to pyrimidine and reverse. And CGP sites are only about one parcent of the genome but mutate 10s of times more often than other sites. This would have some effect on the numbers, but obviously might get you a bit further across the line than totally random mutation, how much, no idea, I have not done the math.

Excellent catch and a serious omission from the book. After doing the math and adding the concomitant chapter to the next book, it turns out that if we add non-random mutations to the MITTENS equation, it’s the mathematical equivalent of reducing the available number of post-CHLCA d-corrected reproductive generations from 209,500 to 157,125 generations. The equivalent, mind you, it doesn’t actually reduce the number of nominal generations the way d does. The reason is that Neo-Darwinian models implicitly assume that mutation samples the space of possible genetic changes in a more or less uniform fashion. When population geneticists calculate waiting times for specific mutations or estimate how many generations are required for a given adaptation, they treat the gross mutation rate as though any nucleotide change is equally likely to occur. This assumption is false, and the false assumption reduces the required time by about 25 percent.

Mutation is heavily biased in at least two ways. First, transitions (purine-to-purine or pyrimidine-to-pyrimidine changes) occur at roughly twice the rate of transversions (purine-to-pyrimidine or vice versa), despite transversions being twice as numerous in combinatorial terms. The observed transition/transversion ratio of 2.1 represents a four-fold deviation from the expected ratio of 0.5 under uniform mutation. Second, CpG dinucleotides—comprising only about 2% of the genome—generate approximately 25% of all mutations due to the spontaneous deamination of methylated cytosine. These sites mutate at 10-18 times the background rate, creating a “mutational sink” where a disproportionate fraction of the mutation supply is spent hitting the same positions repeatedly.

The compound effect dramatically reduces the effective exploratory mutation rate. Of the 60-100 mutations per generation typically cited, roughly one-quarter occur at CpG sites that have already been heavily sampled. Another 40% or more are transitions at non-CpG sites. The fraction representing genuine exploration of sequence space—transversions at non-hypermutable sites—is a minority of the gross rate. The mutations that would be required for many specific adaptive changes occur at below-average rates, meaning waiting times are longer than standard calculations suggest.

This creates a dilemma when applied to observed divergence patterns. Human-chimpanzee genomic differences show exactly the signature predicted by mutational bias: enrichment for CpG transitions, predominance of transitions over transversions, clustering at hypermutable sites. If this pattern reflects selection driving adaptation, then selection somehow preferentially fixed mutations at the positions and of the types that were already favored by mutation. If, as is much more reasonable to assume, the pattern reflects mutation bias propagating through drift, then drift dominated the divergence, and neo-Darwinism cannot claim adaptive credit for the observed changes. Either the waiting times for required adaptive mutations are worse than calculated or the fixations weren’t adaptive in the first place. The synthesis loses either way.

DISCUSS ON SG