Tag: books

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.

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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.

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The Best They’ve Got I

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

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

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

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

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

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

Factual Errors

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

Strategic Omissions

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

Falsehoods and Distortions

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

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

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Sign Up Now for Unlimited

Over the last seven weeks, Castalia House has translated approximately 10 million words from over 100 foreign language works into English. Most of these works have never before been translated into English, including the complete ouvres of major authors like Benito Perez Galdos, Eiji Yoshikawa, Zénaïde Fleuriot, Naoki Sanjugo, and Nomoro Kido. They also include never-before-seen military analyses of historic Japanese battles like Sekigahara, Nagashino, and the Korean Campaign published by the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Army, to say nothing of never-before-translated biographies of historic Japanese figures and long-lost Spanish Church histories.

At some point in the next two weeks, Castalia House will launch Castalia Unlimited, which is designed to be a significant improvement on Kindle Unlimited. It is not a store. We will not offer single books for sale there and we are not attempting to compete with Amazon. What we will offer is a steady and relentless supply of high-quality literature from the public domain of every major literary language on Earth, including English, although the widespread availability from free sites like Project Gutenberg is why we will not focus on English originals. And while we had no intention of making it exclusive, due to the new Amazon KDP publishing limits, we anticipate a growing number of books that will be exclusively available at CU.

You can now sign up and register for an account at Castalia Unlimited. All you need to do is provide a username, and email address, and a password, and we’ll send you back an email to confirm your email address. When the site goes live, you’ll be the first to be notified. And while I’m not going to say anything more about it at the moment, I will say to be sure to sign up if you’re a subscriber to Library, History, Libraria, Cathedra, or Chateau… you are not likely to regret it.

Also, be sure to check your spam and your junk folders if the confirmation email hasn’t arrived within five minutes or so. And finally, not only are print editions coming, they are already here.

Never before translated, coming soon to bookstores near you.

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So That’s a No

You know when you send an email, and about thirty seconds later, you find yourself regretting having sent it and you wonder what the eventual consequences will be? I have to admit, though, that I did not see this one coming. But it is an answer to our request. And it’s fine, as always, we will abide by the rules, and we will switch releasing to two titles per week.

It’s the exact opposite of a problem.

We are updating the title creation limits on KDP to help maintain a positive publishing experience for all authors. Starting Monday, September 21, 2026, you can create up to 2 titles per format per week.

Your weekly limit resets every Sunday at 12:00 AM UTC.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this affect existing or already published titles? No. This limit applies only to creating new titles. Your existing or published titles are not affected.

What formats does this limit apply to? The title creation limit applies to eBook (Kindle), paperback, and hardcover. You can create 2 titles per format per week.

What happens if I reach the limit? If you have reached your weekly limit, you can try again after your weekly limit resets on Sundays at 12:00 AM UTC.

This does not slow us down in the slightest, of course. We will be putting at least two titles on our new site every single day. I have just finished translating one monster work that we start releasing next week once the ten volumes of Sangokushi are all out. And for those who have been asking about print editions, there will be three new Soseki novels available in hardcover later this week, Kokoro, Sanshiro, and Botchan.

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Books Unlimited

We’re expanding the translation and publication program to speeds that the conventional distribution simply cannot handle. We’re also taking a poll on how many books we have to have on the shelf to interest people in access to the rapidly growing library. If you are a reader, please visit Castalia Library and answer the one-question survey there. There is no correct answer; if you’re not interested, then please let us know. If you’re an inveterate KU subscriber who needs at least one million books before you’ll bother, let us know that too.

And thanks to all the existing subscribers for your support. This week’s book has already gone out to you.

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This Week’s Releases

Since we remain limited to publishing ten books per week on Amazon, the complete, unabridged set of Eiji Yoshikawa’s epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms will not be available until next Friday. But it was a very productive week nevertheless, since six of the ten books released have never been available in English before; I particularly recommend The Mystery Planet Gan for anyone who enjoys classic science fiction of the Heinlein juvenile variety.

While the focus on published books was heavy on the Japanese this week, don’t be misled into thinking that the released books represent the fullness of our translation efforts, as we’re now increasing the translation rate to up to 30 books per week in preparation for the launch of Castalia Unlimited, our subscription-only, DRM-free epub store that we expect to launch in October with more than 500 titles available by the end of 2026. Please note that everyone who is a paid subscriber to the Castalia Library will have access to it from the start in case you want to avail yourselves of the weekly ebook release in the interlude.

We also will be announcing three print editions of Natsume Soseki novels, Kokoro, Botchan, and Sanshiro in the coming week, and we’re now working on the print edition of a two-volume set of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto by Eiji Yoshikawa, so rest assured that traditional readers will not be left out.

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The Translations List

Someone asked for the complete list of translations by Castalia House, so I’ve added a page on the Library site that will be regularly updated; it can also be accessed from the top of the site by clicking on Translations. I suppose I can probably add a link on the sidebar here as well; I’ll do that shortly. And, of course, you can always flip through the carousel on the sidebar to see the latest additions: today’s were Kojiki: The Record of Ancient Matters and Sangokushin Book 4. And on Saturday’s I’ll provide a list of the ten translations published this week, complete with links.

Please note that not all books that have been translated have been released yet, and not all of them even appear on the list. We have to maintain a few surprises, after all. I’m told we’re still on track to launch the new Unlimited site in October, but, as always, don’t take our initial estimated dates too seriously.

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The Cost of the Codex

A fascinating article on the massive amount of information that was lost as a result of the change from rolled scrolls to bound codices at Fields & Energy:

The codex transformed books from narratives to be read from beginning to end into repositories to be consulted anywhere at will. For science, this shift was revolutionary: theories, proofs, observations, diagrams, and tables could now be located, compared, annotated, and transmitted with unprecedented efficiency, making cumulative scientific progress far more practicable. The medium may not quite be the entire message, but media do shape the course of scholarly research in general and science in particular.

The transition was not without a downside, however [[ix]].

The change from roll to codex involved the gradual but wholesale transference of ancient literature from one form to another. This was the first major bottle-neck through which classical literature had to pass. It must have been somewhat reduced in the process, but the losses are not easily specified or assessed. There was the danger that little-read works would not be transferred to codex form, and in time … would perish.

A scroll not deemed worthy of the labor of copying to expensive parchment in the third through fifth century would not make the transition. By one estimate, “94 per cent of classical Latin literature was lost in the intervening period between Rome’s downfall and Charlemagne’s rise to power” [[x]]. The Catholic Cardinal and scholar, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) claimed that less than 1 per cent of ancient literature survived [[xi]]. While those claims are suspiciously precise and exact numbers may be difficult to establish, the general sense of massive loss is undeniable. According to one analysis of just Latin literature, we know of only 772 authors in all. Subtract 276 for whom not one word remains, and 352 known only in small fragments or quotations. That makes 80 per cent wholly or almost wholly lost [[xii]]. And how many chroniclers and pamphleteers never came to our attention at all?

Most of the 20 per cent or so of “surviving” authors suffered extensive losses, including Cato the Elder (234–149 BC), Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), Livy (59 BC–AD 17), and Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24–79). “Some of the best remains, but four-fifths of our writers, and apparently more than four-fifths of their writings, are beyond our reach” [[xiii]].

One cannot consider these facts without marvelling at the slenderness of the thread on which the fate of the Latin classics hung. In the case of many texts a single copy survived into the Carolingian period, and often a battered one at that. When the great period of the revival was over, some of the great works of Latin literature were still but a single manuscript on a single shelf [[xiv]].

Aristotle’s analysis of the Constitution of Athens was only recovered from a first-century Egyptian papyrus in 1890 [[xv]]. Aristotle’s Dialogues were widely read, “a golden stream of eloquence,” according to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) [[xvi]]. Today, only fragments survive [[xvii]]. Strabo (c. 64/63 BC–c. AD 24) reported that Aristotle’s library disappeared from public view for generations after passing to his student Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 BC), only to be rediscovered in the first century BC. The bibliophile Apellikon of Teos (d. 84 BC) acquired and recopied the neglected, moldy, and worm-eaten manuscripts [[xviii]]. While modern scholars question parts of the story, it illustrates the precarious survival of ancient literature and how even Aristotle’s works relied upon fortunate rediscovery and continued copying.

It was not only pagan works that suffered the culling, but also Christian classics as well. The Didache: The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles [[xx]], one of the earliest surviving Christian writings outside the New Testament, endured only because on Tuesday, 11 June AD 1056 “Leon the scribe and sinner” completed a copy, and signed and dated it. This single eleventh-century copy was preserved in an Orthodox monastery, and in 1873, a Greek Orthodox Metropolitan named Philotheos Bryennios (1833–1917) rediscovered it.

So for the next 1,500 years, Western scholars knew the Didache the way you might know a famous book you’ve never read—by reputation, by quotation, by the references others made to it. Some suspected it was a legend. Others assumed that what survived in fragments was all there was. Then Bryennios found Leon the monk’s careful 11th century copy sitting in a library in Constantinople… When the first English translation reached New York bookstores on 20 March 1884, 5,000 copies sold in a single day [[xxi]].

We may be seeing a modern version of this with the move from the physical book to the ebook. The problem with the latter, of course, is that while they are easily and inexpensively propagated, they hold no value and they are temporally ephemeral, being wholly dependent upon the availability of the technology to read them. Here the insidious evils of copyright can be seen, as the digital rights management most publishers install on their books virtually assure their inability to survive over time.

It’s interesting to contrast the distinction between the historical interest in the Didache and the relative lack of interest in the hitherto unavailable books that we’ve been translating. Of course, I imagine the media coverage of the English translation of the Didache was considerably greater than it has been of the first-ever English translations of various works of Eiji Yoshikawa and Benito Perez Galdos, among others, despite the massive popularity of the latter in their own cultures.

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A Deep and Natural Antipathy

The fact that Castalia House is actively embracing the development of literary AI while the traditional distribution proudly talks about their “deep, natural antipathy” to it is why we’re going to continue to grow as they inevitably decline. Consider this interview with the CEO of Barnes & Noble:

I have to believe that you’re increasingly seeing books that are at least partially written by AI. How is bookselling and reading going to change, and what role are you going to play in it, with this AI revolution in writing and publishing.

It’s going to be very interesting. We are fortunate in not being the first line of defense, if that’s what it is. Publishers publish the books, they edit the books, they decide what to publish and what not to publish. We then cxurat from amongst those. We have a deep, natural antipathy to anything that isn’t by a real author, and definitely go to great efforts to exclude, both from our online catalog, it probably happens in our stores naturally because we’re selecting and curating, but online, we need to put in a lot of filters to keep the AI rubbish out. There is going to come a time when these books come through. We would ask publishers, to the extent that they know, that they indicate if the books are AI-assisted or AI-written completely so we can pass that on to our customers. I think transparency is important.

It’s all such nonsense. First, transparency is totally unimportant, because if you can’t even tell if a book is AI written or not, then obviously it doesn’t matter and you don’t actually care. Second, keep in mind that these are the people who have been publishing terrible books for sixty years and pushing things like Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray on readers while completely refusing to translate and publish everything from Solzenheitsyn to Perez Galdos, Unno, and Yoshikawa.

The dirty little secret of the publishing industry is that the best AI-assisted books are much better than the average human-written book. Yes, there is a lot of AI rubbish out there, but there is far more human rubbish.

We expect to unleash Castalia Unlimited and the Castalia Reader in October. We’ve already reached our launch goal of 100 books and Amazon’s limit of 10 books per week only limits the number of books we can publish on Amazon, not the number we can produce and publish on our own platform.

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