The Scholars Revolt Spreads

Now it’s the scholars of Belgium who are raging over the suboptimal nature of their educations:

Student riots plaguing France have spread to Belgium, where hundreds of hooded thugs are clashing with police.

The country’s French-speaking community have taken to the streets to protest swingeing cuts to Belgium’s education budget, as the government seeks to save at least €10billion over the coming years to reduce a high deficit.

Inspired in part by protests across the border in France, Belgian school students have taken to the streets in recent days in several towns.

Police said as many as 30,000 demonstrators have flooded Brussels, an ‘unprecedented’ number, after they began arriving at around 9.30am local time today.

They threw cobblestones, bricks, glass bottles, fences and traffic signs at police. One cop was seen taking a samurai sword away from a protester.

These rioters were seen congregating around Brussels Central Station, which sits in between both the European Parliament and the country’s legislature building.

Footage showed demonstrators running amok near the major railway hub. One clip showed masked and hooded figures throwing things into a fire as police stood by watching.

The gathered crowd was heard cheering and whooping as more things were thrown into the inferno.

I just think it’s amusing that we’re still supposed to pretend to believe that the rioters are “students” or that any of this has anything to do with young people desperate for better educations.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Irrelevance of EES

Hilbert: It’s so funny how both Neo-Darwinists and Creationists react in the same frightened way to EES. They immediately sense that naturalist EES shreds their fairy tales to pieces.

Hilbert: I really opened the can of worms here…. my conclusion: Bill is at least trying to understand EES. He knows it’s the leading theory of evolution. Everybody else here, including Vox (unfortunately), is just a fantasist, believing Jewish “Jesus Christ” fairy tales…

Hilbert: (in response to my assertion “it took me less than 30 seconds to determine EES is irrelevant.”) Tell me you’re a fanatical crank on a religious mission without telling me… I must say, you managed to deceive me for a moment. I told myself, surely he didn’t mean it this way… but then your mask slipped and it became undeniable… Apparently you even believe in the “Jesus Christ” fairytale and didn’t even realize that Jesus was Jewish and Christianity is just a delusional Jewish sect… Tell me about that empirical evidence again… I really should have noticed it earlier…

Hilbert: Damn, you’re really just a crank. I initially believed you were a serious guy trying to debunk Neo-Darwinism (as others already did). Turns out, McCarthy vs Vox was just two cranks battling each other… I said some of your expressions made you sound like a fanatical amateur and fantasist. Because I thought you weren’t one. But as it turns out, you actually are one. I simply didn’t know this. Now you openly acknowledge you’re not a naturalist but a fantasist who totally ignores the actual empirical evidence supporting the “concept of evolution”… Case closed. Sad, but that’s life. Bye.

According to Wikipedia, EES stands for The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and consists of a set of theoretical concepts argued to be more comprehensive than the earlier modern synthesis of evolutionary biology that took place between 1918 and 1942. The extended evolutionary synthesis was called for in the 1950s by C. H. Waddington, argued for on the basis of punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1980s, and was reconceptualized in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.

It should not be confused with either the ESS or Evolutionary Stable Strategy, of which Richard Dawkins is so enamored and which is Game Theory applied to attempt to explain observed evolutionary behavior, or the Post-Darwinian Polythesis, which is not just an extension of the modern synthesis, which deals solely with adaptive evolution, but rather, a superset that incorporates both natural selection and ESS with Neutral Theory and various other mechanisms, including relictation. ESS is what I have described as an evolutionary epicycle.

The reason that it took me less than 30 seconds to determine that ESS is as irrelevant as most of the Intelligent Design concepts is because all of the ESS arguments are focused on the adaptive space that natural selection can effect, which a) are at most 2 percent of the average genome and b) don’t even begin to address the same fixation problem that eliminates the possibility of natural selection as a significant generative force. This is why the larger part of the science, the philosophy, the theology, and the general discussion of evolution has been an irrelevant waste of time, money, effort, and ink for the last 160 years.

I had already conclusively proven two things:

  • evolution by natural selection is mathematically impossible.
  • evolution by neutral drift is both mathematically and empirically impossible.

But now I have conclusively proven one more thing:

  • natural selection is empirically irrelevant as an evolutionary mechanism.

Because there is one thing game designers have that no scientists do. And that is unlimited 24-7 access to 96 cores with 512GB RAM and a multicore monster GPU with 96GB RAM, as well as the knowledge of how to effectively make use of that kind of computing power. Which is something we’ll be discussing with the people who made it possible on UATV tonight.

DISCUSS ON SG

Black Britons and White Japanese

It’s really remarkable how the West twists itself into contortions to protect the lies that are destroying its nations:

Robert Jenrick has said that ‘millions and millions’ of people in England are not ‘culturally or ethnically’ English as the identity row dividing the Right escalated.

Kemi Badenoch used her party conference speech on Wednesday to declare herself a ‘proud black Briton’ as she accused Reform of wanting to take the UK backwards with outdated views on race.

The Tory leader spoke out after her former Cabinet colleague Suella Braverman, who defected to Reform, started a row when she said that she did not consider herself to be English, despite being born in London.

And now Reform’s treasury spokesman has waded further into the row, saying ‘there is such a thing as English ethnicity’ and it is ‘perfectly normal’ to debate whether only white people can be English.

Mr Jenrick said: ‘We’ve ended up in a country where there are millions and millions of people who have a British passport in their bedroom drawer, but who are not culturally British by my standards, are not culturally English either, and are not ethnically English as well.

‘And that is a world away from this country as it was 50 years ago, certainly 100 years ago. And this debate is a perfectly normal one for us to be having.’

English people are a subset of white people. So, yes, only white people can be English, just as white people cannot be Zulu, or Japanese, or Malay.

This isn’t hard. But we pretend it is. Paperwork isn’t genetic.

DISCUSS ON SG

Not Just the Evo-Avengers

It doesn’t surprise me at all, but some of the Intelligent Design-adjacent crowd is starting to get very butthurt over Probability Zero and my total lack of interest in their pet evolutionary epicyles. They obviously don’t grasp that I’m genuinely not on anyone’s side except that of the truth itself, whatever that happens to be. I have neither interests nor previous commitments to defend; I’m free to go wherever the evidence and my own curiosity takes me.

From the comments of William Dembski’s interview with me:

Hilbert: Great discussion. Great to see Bill raising EES/Third Way. This is the most likely explanation. Vox shouldn’t dismiss it without having studied it. I’m certain the EES community welcomes Vox’s work.

Bill Dembski: Hi Hilbert. Nice to hear from you. I’ve seen an updated edition of Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which should be out this November. In it he has a chapter titled “An Unresolved Crisis,” where he takes on EES/TWE and argues that these have not resolved the crisis, in particular by not explaining the Types and by not explaining the systems that allow the new mechanisms (such as natural genetic engineering) to work in the first place. I’ll be announcing this book on this Substack, so stay tuned!

Vox Day: I’m not dismissing it, I’m totally unfamiliar with it, but I have not seen anything from it on the mathematical side. And if you don’t solve that to correctly account for what is observably there, then you’ve got nothing no matter how sound the logic is. The reason my initial stance is skeptical is because based on the reactions on every side, both positive and negative, no one seems to have put any effort into looking at the relevant math. No matter what your positive theory is, you have to answer for it. I hope the ESS/Third Way people are doing just that.

Hilbert: Hi Bill and Vox, many thanks for your replies. I’d say EES removes and replaces pretty much every pillar of neo-Darwinism: random mutations (unimportant), natural selection (unimportant), central dogma (it’s two-ways). This allows for directed and adaptive evolution, much closer to what Lamarck envisioned. So I’d say the arguments against neo-Darwinism, including the mathemical ones, hardly apply to EES. And unlike neo-Darwinism, it’s an open theory that can easily incorporate new mechanisms of genetic adaptation, even radical ones, once discovered. What EES cannot explain, and doesn’t pretend to explain, is how this amazing genetic/cellular system emerged in the first place. But even Creationists, to the extent they still are Naturalists, probably have to rely on EES to explain evolution. So I’d definitely encourage everybody to study EES papers and books (Bill has clearly already done so), as this seems to be the most promising theory of evolution.

Vox Day: Again, those statements don’t address the primary factor. Unless the model addresses the existing and observable accounting, it is irrelevant. I don’t know how I can explain this any more simply. All of these appeals to logic and possibility are just handwaving. There are real, observable facts that absolutely have to be addressed. If you’re not addressing them, you’re irrelevant. That doesn’t mean EES is wrong. I have no idea. But I will not even have an opinion one way or the other, or waste 30 seconds looking into it, until the relevant calculations, taking into account timescales and reproductive limits, are provided. What I know is natural selection is impossible. Neutral substitution through genetic drift is impossible. Those things are firmly established. Which is why I very much doubt any mechanism will rescue the concept of evolution.

Hilbert: In short, if you want to solve evolution, you absolutely should study EES in depth. Perhaps you fear that it actually might be able to explain evolution? In a naturalist way? Well that is your problem then.

Hilbert: Vox, I have to say, these are poor answers that make you sound like a fanatical amateur, unfortunately. “I have no idea”, “I will not even have an opinion”, “waste 30 seconds looking into it”. This doesn’t sound good, to be honest. The factual points you mention (natural selection, neutral substitution, genetic drift) have basically no relevance when it comes to EES. EES understands that these mechanism, though real, play almost no role in evolution. They rely on much more powerful mechanisms already observed in nature, (some of which mentioned by Bill), and they are open to additional mechanisms yet to be discovered (like hybridization or whatever). If you deny “the concept of evolution”, you’re probably not a naturalist, but a fantasist. Every observation we know confirms evolution did and does take place. Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism simply failed to explain it. And the challenge is not just speed (the point you focus on in your book). This is actually one of the smaller problems. The bigger problem, even if you can explain speed, is solving functionality (we see almost no failures in nature).

Vox Day: Posturing and name-calling hasn’t worked well for the Neo-Darwinians and the Neutral theorists. Unless you’ve actually done the quant work, you will very likely regret drawing my attention to your pet theory. And what is there to fear? I have no dog in this hunt. I don’t care if it’s evolution, God, or aliens.

Hilbert: Vox, at this point I think it’s clear your disingenuous, perhaps even to yourself: “I have no dog in this hunt. I don’t care if it’s evolution, God, or aliens.” You obviously strongly care. You obviously have a dog in this hunt… And you’re the one name-calling people, viciously and repeatedly. I don’t name-call you at all. I just told you that some of your statements make you sound like a fanatical amateur and a fantasist, not a naturalist, unfortunately. That is, it damages your case. If you really try to dismiss “evolution as a concept”, then you’re making the exact same mistake as Dennis McCarthy: conflating evolution and Neo-Darwinism. That’s like claiming fire doesn’t exist because the phlogiston theory didn’t explain it. It’s just stupid. For EES, the quant problem is not an issue in the way it was for Neo-Darwinism. This is because Neo-Darwinism limited evolution to a few trivial mechanisms (like random mutations). And this simply didn’t work out. So Neo-Darwinism failed.

In contrast, EES is open to any naturalist mechanism, and already includes much more powerful and directional mechanisms than the ones Neo-Darwinism allows (Bill mentioned several of them).

“you will very likely regret drawing my attention to your pet theory.”

Again, you’re wrong: it’s not my pet theory, I didn’t contribute anything to it, it’s simply the leading theory of evolution. And again, it’s obvious you do have a dog in this hunt… it’s obvious you try to salvage and protect your own pet theory… So overall a very disappointing performance. It looks like you’re really just a fantasist who happened to notice what was already obvious to many serious biologists: Neo-Darwinism fails to explain evolution, and then you tried to dismiss “evolution as a concept.”

If you don’t study EES, you’ll simply stay irrelevant. But because you can’t attack it with trivial math arguments, you’ll probably not even try to understand it.

Vox Day: Yeah, it took me less than 30 seconds to determine EES is irrelevant. Whether it operates or not, it is still totally irrelevant to the human genome and every other genome. Now stop posturing, shut up, and wait patiently for the nuke to land on your face. The analysis is done. The math is settled. The empirical evidence is conclusive. And just remember, you genuinely said I sounded like “a fanatical amateur and a fantasist”. But you’re right, I’m not a naturalist. I’m just a game designer. But one single game designer can do in a week what 170 years worth of naturalists couldn’t.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Epic Test

I’m not going to say anything more about it at the moment, but we’re currently running an epic data analysis that is going to break new ground and might even reveal a few surprises. Also, today I came up with a new disproof of the Post-Darwinian polythesis that has nothing to do with either MITTENS or Reverse-MITTENS, is very nearly as conclusive as both of them, and is even easier to test empirically.

So, we have achieved triangulation, even as we await Erika and the Evo-Avengers to launch their no-doubt very impressive assault on Probability Zero, MITTENS, and your woefully outnumbered, outcredentialed dark lord.

DISCUSS ON SG

No Reconciliation

I’ll give Day exactly one thing: There is, in fact, no reconciliation between the observant and the deluded. There is no way either us or him will change their mind. He’s just got it bass-ackwards which one is which.

Actually, based on my most recent work, I genuinely believe they will all eventually come around to my way of thinking with regards to evolution and population genetics. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, they will have no choice but to either a) reconcile themselves to the Probability Zero math or b) run off to Las Vegas and pursue a very different career.

In the meantime, I’m sure we’re all breathlessly awaiting the next video from Erika and the Eco-Avengers.

DISCUSS ON SG

Let Them Take Out LA

“With the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay … let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.” – President Donald Trump

What a madman. Although to be honest, I think most Americans are hoping for New York City and Washington DC in addition to LA. Who has anything against all the Mexicans in San Diego? I mean, sure, they cheer against the US men’s soccer team, but that’s fair enough.

Chuck D was a prophet.

I find the outraged reaction both amusing and inclined to miss the point.

People are cheering this on? WTF!? They’ll tell you they love America but start cheering when the POS POTUS talks about taking out a couple U.S. cities. These are god damned patriots!?

Yes. Because LA isn’t America. New York City isn’t America. Washington DC isn’t America. They’re cities occupied by the enemies of America.

This isn’t that hard.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Best They’ve Got II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISCUSS ON SG

An Epic Day

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

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

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

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

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

DISCUSS ON SG