Tag: science

No Peers, No Problem

I don’t submit my papers to peer review for the obvious reason that I have no peers. But I would definitely submit them to this gentleman’s new AI replacement for peer review:

I’ve been prototyping an automated peer review project. With current models you get human level peer review for about $0.10 of tokens. For $5 you can rederive every result, check every statistical inference, and audit every paper cited in both directions.

There are about 100m papers in the scientific corpus. Most are not important. Many are sloppy. For structural reasons it’s essentially impossible to change published work, even to correct a typo.

For $500m today you can thoroughly audit every paper ever written. Every p-hacked result, every plagiarist, every fabrication, every citation club, everything.

It will work a lot better than peer review too, for the reasons that I laid out in HARDCODED. What most people fail to realize is that peer review is just the editorial slush pile; it no more ensures the publication of good science than slush pile readers guarantee the publication of quality fiction.

But here is the thing that should terrify all those evo-avengers sneering at “Vox Day’s AI-written books”: the mathematicians are not sneering at all the mathematical proofs being published by OpenAI. To the contrary, they are claiming that it is unfair and will eventually render them unnecessary.

The same will definitely be true of most butterfly collectors. After all, AI wouldn’t have wasted 160 years on such obviously bad science as evolution by natural selection. It already knows better once it is free to actually run the numbers on the assumptions trained into it. Just finding the typos and copy-paste errors alone will make it far more useful than the peer reviewers have ever been.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Method is the Conclusion

If your thought when you read someone saying that they’ve overturned 100 years of established science, is “oh wow! This guy’s a genius, they’re all wrong!” And not “what’s this guy missing that everybody else isn’t”, then you really need to address your biases, and how they’re affecting your ability to learn.

As I pointed out to Erika herself, regardless of whether I am an arrogant lunatic or a world-class scientific genius of historic note, how would anyone, no matter how well-credentialed, ever be able to tell the difference given their absolute refusal to even look at the growing body of evidence that natural selection is a very weak force totally incapable of accounting for the chimp-human genetic divergence, much less the origin of the species?

With regards to the inverse of the question concerning what I am missing that everyone else isn’t, Athos and I ran into a very interesting anomaly while we were sorting through the various ape genomes to determine precisely how genetically divergent the seven species are. What we discovered is that the protein-guided CDS alignment method has a circular reasoning problem that’s impossible to ignore once you recognize it:

  1. You want to measure how conserved proteins are (dN/dS) to prove the strength of purifying natural selection.
  2. You align them using substitution matrices built from observed conservation patterns
  3. The aligner penalizes divergent amino acid substitutions while scoring the alignments
  4. Regions too divergent to score well get gapped out or are left unaligned, so they aren’t counted.
  5. You measure conservation on what remains
  6. Hey presto! You find strong conservation! Quelle surprise!

In other words, the method presupposes the conclusion. This is, again, the same way one proves that Kevin Hart can dunk a basketball on a 10-foot basket, by showing that he is one inch taller than Lebron James. The aligner’s scoring function is a model of purifying selection that treats radical amino acid changes as improbable and therefore unlikely to be true matches. So divergent codons are excluded from the alignment before dN/dS is ever computed. Those excluded codons are enriched for nonsynonymous substitutions by definition, because that’s why they scored poorly in the protein alignment.

The whole-genome alignment we utilize doesn’t have this scoring bias. Cactus aligns DNA based on genomic context — synteny, flanking sequence, structural features — without reference to protein function. It’s agnostic about whether a coding region is conserved or divergent. When we project gene coordinates onto that alignment and extract codons, we get ALL the aligned coding positions, not just the ones that are deemed to look conserved at the protein level.

The diagnostic data confirms this. Single-SNV codons, the positions where there’s exactly one nucleotide difference in the codon, so classification is completely unambiguous, show 71.6% nonsynonymous, 28.4% synonymous. dN/dS = 0.71 on those alone. There’s no misalignment artifact that explains a 3:1 nonsynonymous-to-synonymous ratio on unambiguous single-substitution codons. That’s just what the genome looks like.

And so the gene set comparison nails the coffin shut on the alternative explanation. We ran the same test on their smaller subset, which I suspected might be cherry-picked. Except they weren’t. If the protein aligner were simply being more careful and excluding messy regions that our pipeline misaligns, then we’d expect the nonsynonymous fraction to vary considerably across gene subsets. Fast-evolving gene families and duplications would show different ratios than conserved 1:1 orthologs. But they don’t. It’s 73.8% nonsynonymous across every subset we tested. The signal is uniform across the genome, it’s not concentrated in problematic genes.

So what the Consortium’s method actually measured is: “among the coding positions conserved enough to survive protein alignment, how conserved are they?” That’s not a valid measurement, that’s a tautological quantification.

The whole field of evolutionary biology has interpreted dN/dS = 0.23 as evidence that purifying selection eliminates 77% of nonsynonymous mutations before they reach fixation. But the whole-genome measurement of dN/dS = 0.7989 implies that only 20 percent are actually eliminated, which is nearly four times less purifying selection than the mainstream science assumes. The difference is not a matter of gene selection, quality filtering, or computational error. It is a methodological artifact of using a conservation-dependent alignment to measure conservation.

Gene SetGenes MeasuredPooled dN/dSNonsyn Fraction
A: All GENCODE20,4000.798973.9%
B: 1:1 chimp orthologs16,9950.795673.8%
B-HC: High-confidence 1:115,9370.793973.8%
C: Excluded by filter3,4050.823774.4%
Published (Consortium 2005)13,4540.2300~40%

These findings have two significant implications.

First, they demonstrate that the canonical evidence for strong purifying selection in coding sequences is methodologically compromised and therefore incorrect. Second, they indicate that even coding sequences are evolving near-neutrally. Purifying selection exists, but is a much weaker mechanism than previously believed, removing roughly one in five nonsynonymous mutations rather than three in four. This is consistent with the drift-dominated picture that emerges from the LTEE data and from the mathematical breeding reality constraints: natural selection exists but operates at the margins, and contrary to what has been believed for the last 160 years, it has never been the dominant force shaping protein evolution between closely related species.

And, just to be clear, none of this genomic analysis has anything to do with MITTENS per se. It merely happens to be empirical evidence that tends to independently confirm the mathematical and empirical impossibility of evolution by natural selection.

DISCUSS ON SG

Natural Philosophy

The connection between my assault on TENS and the development of Veriphysics has become apparent to others:

“Natural selection” by its primary definition is only useful for narrative storytelling, which is the only sort of “explanation” evolutionary biologists are actually comfortable with or capable of. This is the “natural selection” of evo psych and of the vast majority of evolutionary literature. Whenever you hear stories about what such-and-such trait “evolved for” or the “problem” that evolution (spoken of as if it were a causal agent) was “trying” to “solve,” you are seeing an example of natural selection by its primary definition.

The problem is that just as just as “natural selection” by its primary definition is incoherent and doesn’t refer to anything in reality, so these just-so stories about purposes being “selected for” or “solved” don’t actually have any coherent meaning and don’t cash out to anything in concrete physical reality.

“Natural selection” by its secondary definition, meanwhile, refers to something real, but it is only useful for things like statistical analysis of which allele variants were “selected” and estimates of “selection coefficients” and so on, not for giving any sort of explanation for new biological function.

The only relationship between these two definitions of “natural selection” is that Darwinists, starting with Darwin himself, conflate the two by using the same name for them both and by equivocating between them as convenient to evade criticism. If the critic points out that natural selection by its primary definition is incoherent and that its just-so stories don’t cash out to anything in concrete physical reality, the Darwinist will switch to the secondary definition by pointing out that some variants logically have to be more advantageous in a given environment than others and that “selection coefficients” can even be estimated. If the critic points out that natural selection by the second definition is a tautology that can’t in principle explain biological function, the Darwinist will switch to the primary definition by insisting that natural selection is basically like a human designer selecting variants for his intended purpose but with unfathomable amounts of time.

As part of the conflation of these two different concepts, the Darwinist is forced to conflate two different meanings of “beneficial” and “the fittest.” Specifically, the idea of a variant being “beneficial” or “more fit” in the sense of having a reproductive advantage in its immediate environment has to be conflated with it being fit or beneficial for the long-term purposes of “natural selection” imagined as an intelligent agent trying to build future integrated systems with new function, even though these two definitions have no logical relationship to each other.

Now this is where Vox’s Triveritas comes into play. Because Darwinian natural selection is not one concept, but actually two very different concepts conflated together, the different aspects of Darwinism are susceptible to the three legs of the Triad to different degrees.

“Natural selection” by its primary definition is really only susceptible to analysis in terms of its logical validity. Precisely because it is logically invalid, none of its narrative storytelling explanations cash out to anything concrete that can be empirically evaluated or mathematically modeled. At best we can say that it’s susceptible to a very loose sort of empirical disconfirmation, such as that actual human behavior doesn’t follow the expectations of evo psych. But as Darwinists have amply shown, they can always spin a new narrative about “natural selection” to “explain” any outcome or its opposite.

Natural selection by its secondary definition can be logically critiqued for its tautological nature, and the conflation of the two can of course be logically critiqued for being a logical conflation.

However, the Darwinian insistence that the two definitions of “natural selection” are actually one and the same opens up avenues for different degrees of hybrid logical-mathematical and logical-empirical critiques of “natural selection” by its primary definition.

Because “natural selection” by its primary definition is meant to account for biological function, if some aspects of biological function can be mathematically quantified or modeled, and if “natural selection” by its secondary definition can be shown to be mathematically incapable of reaching it, then natural selection by both definitions is thereby shown to be incapable of explaining what it is meant to by a combination of logic and math.

It’s retrospectively obvious, I suppose, but it is a little ironic that I didn’t see it in the larger context earlier, even though I specifically turned the Triveritas on natural selection proper, rather than the larger argument around the polythesis. And it wasn’t until William Dembski brought my attention toward ID that I finally understood the relationship between what I’d hitherto regarded as having no more connection than either do to the SSH.

Although I suppose even that comes into play thanks to Michael Sartain and other evopsych enthusiasts.

DISCUSS ON SG

How Biologists Keep “Proving” Selection

There’s a reliable pattern playing out here again. I probably shouldn’t be surprised by it anymore at this point, but the shamelessness amazes me every time Athos and I catch them at it. Again.

When the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium published their “complete” genome comparison in 2005, they reported that humans and chimpanzees share 98.77% sequence identity. What they didn’t mention in the headlines, and what you had to dig deep into the supplementary materials to discover, was that this number was calculated only on the portions of the two genomes that could be aligned to each other. The unaligned portions, the structural differences, the insertions and deletions, in other words, all of the obvious differences, were quietly excluded from the denominator. Twenty years later, when Yoo et al. published the actual telomere-to-telomere comparison in 2025, the real number turned out to involve an estimated 410 million total genomic differences, not 35 million. They’d been working with less than a tenth of the actual divergence between the two genomes.

This is like proving that Kevin Hart is one inch taller than LeBron James if you exclude 16 inches from Lebron’s side of the equation. Only worse.

When Barrick et al. published the initial LTEE results in Nature in 2009, they reported on a single population out of twelve. One out of twelve, a hypermutating population which fixed 68 percent faster over the first 20,000 generations than the average of the five non-hypermutational populations. It took until Good et al. 2017 for the data from all twelve populations to be published, and when you actually look at all twelve, the picture changes considerably. In fact, ten of the twelve populations even show intervals where fixations are being undone faster than any new ones complete. But the original single-population paper set the narrative and evolution’s defenders appeal to it to this day in the face of much more complete and much more detailed evidence.

When the same 2005 Consortium reported the canonical Ka/Ks ratio, which is advertised as the measure of natural selection’s strength in coding sequences, they reported 0.23. This number has been cited thousands of times. It appears in textbooks. It is treated as an established fact about human-chimp divergence. So we took a look at how they derived it. One guess as to what they did. One guess as to which way their methodology inclines. Just one guess is all you need.

Ka/Ks (also written as dN/dS) is the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitution rates in protein-coding genes. A nonsynonymous substitution changes the amino acid and a synonymous one doesn’t. Because synonymous changes are assumed to be selectively neutral, they provide a baseline mutation rate. If natural selection is purifying and removes harmful mutation then Ka/Ks should be well below 1.0. The published value of 0.23 means, supposedly, that natural selection eliminates roughly 77% of amino acid-changing mutations in coding sequences. This has been one of the primary pieces of evidence that natural selection is a powerful force shaping the genome.

We set out to verify their number. Not using their curated dataset, but thanks to the UATV subscribers who provided us with the twin 96-core beasts, by using the whole-genome alignment data and every annotated coding gene in the human genome. We used GENCODE v46 annotations, the same Nei-Gojobori method the original studies used, and the complete extraction of human-chimp aligned positions from the T2T-quality assemblies. And we got a result.

dN/dS = 0.80.

Not 0.23. 0.80. What. The. Fuck?

Where did we go wrong? Unlike properly credentialed scientists, I don’t even trust my own numbers until I’ve systematically tried to break them down, so the first thing I did was to run a comprehensive diagnostic to find the error in Athos’s calculations.

The diagnostic checked everything:

  • Is the alignment data complete? Yes. The extraction contains 226 million positions for chromosome 1 alone, the full alignment, not just divergent sites. 98.8% of coding positions are found.
  • Is the substitution classification correct? Yes. We inspected individual codons: GCC(Ala)→GCG(Ala) correctly classified as synonymous. CTT(Leu)→CGT(Arg) correctly classified as nonsynonymous. Every sample codon checks out.
  • Could multi-hit codons be skewing the results? No. We computed the ratio using only single-SNV codons, codons where exactly one position differs between human and chimp, making the synonymous/nonsynonymous classification completely unambiguous. Single-SNV codons show 71.6% nonsynonymous, 28.4% synonymous. dN/dS = 0.71 for single-SNV codons alone.

The code is correct. The data is complete. The number is real.

So where does 0.23 come from? We computed dN/dS on 20,400 protein-coding genes, which is every gene annotated in GENCODE v46 that has coding sequence data in the human-chimp alignment.

The Consortium used 13,454.

And there’s that same old trick again. They threw out 6,946 genes, one-third of the relevant data, through their “curation” pipeline for identifying “1:1 orthologs.” Our dataset includes 51.6% more genes than theirs.

We then applied every published quality filter we could identify, removing genes with stop codons, genes with too many gaps, genes with fewer than five substitutions, genes with saturated synonymous rates, genes shorter than 300bp, outlier genes with dN/dS > 2.0. We applied them individually and in every combination.

The result? No combination of quality filters moves the number below 0.65. The most aggressive combined filter stack we could construct, requiring no stop codons in either species, low gap frequency, minimum substitution count, length threshold, and outlier removal, still produced dN/dS = 0.64 on 10 remaining genes. Sixty-four percent. Not twenty-three.

As far as I can tell so far, the only way to get 0.23 is to start with a pre-selected gene set that has already excluded the genes that don’t fit the expected answer. It is the same pattern every time:

  • 2005: The “complete” genome. Exclude the unaligned portions of the genome. Report 1.2% divergence on the aligned fraction. Let the public think 1.2% means “98.8% identical” when the actual whole-genome difference is nearly 10x larger.
  • 2009: The LTEE. Report the results from one population out of twelve. The one that tells the most favorable story. Wait eight years before publishing the other eleven. And don’t even bother sequencing the most recent 300,000 generations, because the trajectory and its implications are already apparent.
  • 2025: The “all genome” comparison. Lead with the SNV headline number and report divergence percentages using a denominator that excludes genome size differences. SNV divergence and structural divergence are reported separately, in different sheets of an 82-sheet supplementary spreadsheet, computed by three different tools on three different bases, with no consolidated ledger. The divergence numbers don’t appear in the paper, but are buried on pages 14, 19, and 24 and have to be located and identified before one realizes that they aren’t additive and no total is either calculated or provided.
  • 2005: Ka/Ks = 0.23. Use 13,454 pre-selected genes. Exclude one-third of the coding genome through a “curation” process that is, conveniently, difficult to reproduce or independently verify. Report the result as though it characterizes the genome.

In every case, the full data tells a very different story than the published headline number. In every case, the headline number is the one that just happens to be most favorable to the reigning evolutionary paradigm. And in every case, you have to go dig out the raw data and run the numbers yourself before you discover the discrepancy. Which, of course, is why I do that.

So here is the significance of what dN/dS = 0.80 means. A dN/dS of 0.23 means purifying selection is removing 77% of nonsynonymous mutations — a powerful, dominant force. That’s the textbook narrative. A dN/dS of 0.80 means purifying selection is removing only about 20% of nonsynonymous mutations. At that level, selection is barely distinguishable from neutral evolution. The genome-wide coding sequence is evolving at nearly the neutral rate.

This has direct consequences for the larger determination of whether natural selection is a primary evolutionary mechanism. If selection can’t even dominate the substitution rate in the coding sequences, in the one area where it should be strongest, because coding sequences directly determine protein function, then it certainly cannot be the primary mechanism reshaping the genome. At dN/dS = 0.80, natural selection is not the primary mechanism of adaptive evolution. We already have fairly good evidence showing that it is not the secondary mechanism either. It may not even be the tertiary one.

It’s a little too soon to say that the responsible scientists were being disingenuous. It’s a little too soon to say that I am absolutely confident in our present results. But here is what we can demonstrate: The Consortium’s 13,454-gene list can be reconstructed from Ensembl ortholog annotations. I’ve told Athos to compute dN/dS on their gene set using our alignment data, and we will also compute it on our full gene set. If the Consortium’s curated subset gives ~0.23 and our complete set gives ~0.80, then the case is closed: the published number is an artificial artifact of cherry-picked genes, not an observed property of the human genome.

Athos and I will publish those results, along with the full per-gene dN/dS distribution, in a forthcoming paper on Zenodo. And then, we’ll see what happens.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Fourth Mechanism

Earlier this week, I introduced the concept of relictation, the mathematically derived fixation of ancestral variation through population bottlenecks, as a third distinct mechanism of genomic change alongside natural selection and genetic drift. Relictation was proposed to account for patterns of divergence that neither selection nor drift could explain within the available timelines, as demonstrated by the MITTENS accounting framework.

MITTENS performs an all-cause accounting of genomic divergence. It counts every base pair of difference between two complete, gap-free genomes and compares the total against the empirically observed rate at which changes become fixed in real populations. The result, across every great ape species examined, is that the observed divergence considerably exceeds what fixation can produce in the available time, by multiple orders of magnitude.

Relictation offered a partial answer to the observed accounting problem. If speciation events involve small founding populations carrying non-representative samples of ancestral variation, the resulting lineages would show divergence patterns that look like accumulated substitutions but are actually inherited differences, relics of the ancestral population’s diversity, established across the entire species in one stroke by the bottleneck itself. I looked into that by utilizing Unauthorized’s twin 96-core 512GB RAM beasts to analyze all six complete ape genomes provided by the T2T Primate Consortium. Analysis of the fine-grained distribution of substitutions across the human genome now suggests that relictation cannot be the whole story and may not be the only discrete mechanism at work.

The substitution density across the genome is massively overdispersed, more than 80 times more variable than a uniform-rate process predicts. This variation is not random. Dense regions cluster next to other dense regions, forming contiguous blocks of elevated substitution with sharp boundaries in a pattern we call mesas. Within these mesas, the substitutions are disproportionately concentrated on the human lineage. A single mesa on a single chromosome shows an excess of human-lineage substitutions that exceeds both the MITTENS fixation ceiling and the maximum that natural selection can theoretically fix across the entire genome according to Haldane.

These mesa signatures are consistent with relictation. A bottleneck could produce exactly this shape. But the sheer scale and density of the mesas raises an inescapable question: is there too much structured divergence for multiple bottleneck events to credibly account for?

So I am now contemplating whether what the mesas reveal is a fourth mechanism operating alongside relictation, or an alternative third mechanism that produces the same signature through a different cause. I propose the term sigillation for the hypothesis that some of these mesa regions represent deliberate genomic modification: discrete engineering events that wrote contiguous blocks of change into one dominate lineage. Sigillation predicts the same observable shape as relictation, featuring elevated density, sharp boundaries, and lineage asymmetry, but from a fundamentally different cause.

Both hypotheses remain open. And both may be true simultaneously, as some mesas may be bottleneck relics while others are indications of genetic engineering. Distinguishing between them will require significant further research by those with the tools to do so. But what the data establish beyond any dispute is that a) the mesa signature exists, b) that it is the dominant source of genomic divergence between humans and the great apes, and, c) no account of speciation is complete without it.

Sigillation is no more proof of IGM than relictation is. But it may be initial evidence of IGM. I stress that sigillation is not the only possible explanation for the observed anomalies; the evidence also credibly points to far more outlandish hypotheses than mere intelligent engineering being performed on this planet at some point in the past. What we do know is that neither natural selection nor neutral diffusive drift can still be considered viable candidates. And there is no need to take my word for anything with regards to this, all of the data has been provided by the T2T Primate Consortium (Yoo et al. 2025) aligned with Progressive Cactus (Armstrong et al. 2020).

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Invoking the Triveritas

A reader has a thought about the butterfly collectors like the Evo-Avengers and others who have a difficult time grasping mathematical arguments:

There are three legs to your Triad: Logical validity, Empirical anchoring, and Mathematical Coherence. If the innumerate cannot follow your arguments from mathematical calculations with respect to offshoots of Darwinism like EES, do you suppose the other two legs of the Triad can do the demolition without relying on the mathematical arguments?

For people not swayed by arguments and data, it wouldn’t make a difference but there may be some who would respond better to arguments from the other two perspectives? It might not be worth your time to bother though as you seem to have other constructive projects you’re engaging in when not harvesting credentialed skulls.

Logical validity is the weakest and least rhetorically effective leg. That’s exactly what the ID guys have been doing for decades and it hasn’t gotten them anywhere. Only a small percentage of the population can follow logic, the scope of the logic often isn’t quite as grand as the logician characteristically supposes, and it has no way of checking itself for validity. So long as the major and the minor arguments hold up, the logic is sound; this was always the fundamental problem with logic that science was supposed to solve.

Mathematical coherence is valuable because it provides for a check on the logic. Most, though not all, math is naturally connected to an underlying logic; quantum mechanics is one area where we see the math tends to overshoot the logic and also lack any empirical anchoring. This is why all the brilliant minds at Caltech and MIT have been spinning their wheels and going nowhere for decades, and why the Wistar mathematicians didn’t make a dent on the evolutionary debate despite their mathematics not only holding up, but going virtually uncontested for the last 60 years.

So what’s missing is the empirical anchoring for both. The problem here is that for the most part, we’re relying on scientists who have a poor grasp of both logic and math to interpret the empirical results they are getting, and then permitting a completely ignorant science media to explain everything to the likes of Erika and the Eco-Avengers. So it’s no wonder that they look at Probability Zero with the stunned incomprehension of proto-chimps trying to master the mystery of fire. Just look at the very obvious problems you can see with the two primary papers relating to the human-chimp divergence, starting with Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome, published in Nature on September 1, 2005.

The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium reported a difference of 1.06 percent based on the comparison of two partial genomes. But those partial genomes were at least 8.57 percent different based on size alone! So despite all the very real, very serious, very important work being more or less accurately reported by the consortium, it was misleading garbage even for a work in progress.

There is a similar problem with the Yoo et al 2025 study upon which I relied heavily in the second edition of Probability Zero. Yoo reported a total genomic difference of 410 million base pairs. I therefore divided that difference in two, a division for which I have been repeatedly criticized by a number of butterfly collectors who complain, quite correctly, that we don’t know if the difference should be biased more toward the chimp or human side. The fact that this doesn’t matter in the slightest to my mathematical disproof of natural selection never occurs to them, but fine, let’s look into it… at which point we realize that Yoo et al can’t possibly be correct because 7 billion x 0.0857 is not 410,000,000 but 599,900,000. Darwin, we have a problem.

And note that 600M is just the size difference alone, and therefore doesn’t even begin to take into account the original 1.06 percent difference that was focused on areas of alignment between the two genomes.

So you can see that a) there is still work to be done on the actual size of the chimp-human divergence as well as b) why the Triveritas is a useful heuristic even when one isn’t engaged in deep philosophy. For as veriphysics teaches, it is only when the logic, the math, and the empirical evidence all triangulate an answer can one be reasonably confident that the answer is both substantive and correct.

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

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