Tag: science

An Inspiring Critique

Dennis McCarthy recently put up a post offering a detailed critique of the Amazon-banned Amazon bestseller Probability Zero. We don’t know that it was publishing Probability Zero and the effectiveness of the book that inspired some evolutionary enthusiast in the KDP department to ban Castalia’s account, but we can be very confident that it wasn’t because Castalia submitted my own Japanese translation of my own book for publication without having the right to do so, as we were informed.

In any event, McCarthy’s critique is the first substantive one we’ve seen and it’s a more competent attempt to engage with the mathematical arguments in Probability Zero than those from Redditors opining in ignorance, but his critique immediately fails for multiple reasons that demonstrate the significant difference between biological intuition and mathematical rigor. For some reason, McCarthy elects to focus on the Darwillion, my probability calculation about the likelihood of evolution by natural selection instead of MITTENS itself, but that’s fine. Either way, there was no chance he was going to even scratch the paint on the proven fact of the mathematical impossibility of natural selection.

“What Vox Day calculated—(1/20,000)^20,000,000—are the odds that a particular group or a pre-specified list of 20 million mutations (or 20 million mutations in a row) would all become fixed. In other words, his calculation would only be accurate if the human race experienced only 20 million mutations in total over the last 9 million years—and every one of them then became fixed… Using Vox Day’s numbers, in a population of 10,000 humans, we would expect, on average, 50,000 new mutations per year. And over the course of 9 million years, this means we would expect: 50,000 × 9 million = 450 billion new mutations altogether. So out of 450 billion mutations, how many mutations may we expect to achieve fixation? Well, as Vox Day noted, each mutation has a probability of 1/20,000 in becoming fixed. 450 billion × 1/20,000 = 22.5 million fixed mutations.”

This is a category error. What McCarthy has done here is abandon Darwin, abandon natural selection, and retreated to an aberrant form of neutral theory that he’s implementing without even realizing that he has done so. He’s cargo-culting the structure of Kimura’s core equation that underlies neutral theory without understanding what the terms mean or where they come from. Because my numbers weren’t arbitrary, they are straight out of Kimura’s fixation model.

So he took my number for mutations arising, which depends on effective population (Nₑ), multiplied it by the fixation probability (which depends on 1/Nₑ), and got the textbook neutral theory answer because the Nₑ terms cancel each other out. He wrote it as “mutations × probability” because he was reverse-engineering an argument to match the observed 20 million, not applying the theory directly. It’s rather like someone proving F=ma by measuring force and acceleration separately, then multiplying them together and thinking they’ve discovered mass. It’s technically correct, yes, but also completely misses the point.

The next thing to point out is that not only is what he’s cited incorrect and irrelevant, it isn’t even a defense of evolution through natural selection. McCarthy’s rebuttal has nothing to do with Darwin, nothing to do with adaptation, nothing to do with fitness, nothing to do with selection pressure, nothing to do with speciation, and nothing to do with all of the biogeography that McCarthy later lovingly details. Neutral theory, or genetic drift, if you prefer, is what happens automatically over time, and it is appealed to by biologists as a retreat from Neo-Darwinism to try to explain the existence of these huge genetic caps for which they know natural selection and sexual selection cannot possibly account.

Even the great defender of orthodox Darwinism, Richard Dawkins, has retreated from TENS. It’s now “the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow.” Or, as I prefer to call it, TE(p)NSSSBMGDAGF.

This is exactly what I mean when I talk about evolutionary epicycles.

And in the interest of perfect clarity, note this: Dennis McCarthy’s critique of Probability Zero is not, in any way, a defense of evolution by natural selection. Nor can it be cited as a defense of speciation or Darwinism at all, because neutral theory has as about as much to do with Darwin as the Book of Genesis. But don’t take my word for it, listen to the scientist himself:

“In sharp contrast to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, the neutral theory claims that the overwhelming majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level are caused by random fixation (due to random sampling drift in finite populations) of selectively neutral (i.e., selectively equivalent) mutants under continued inputs of mutations.”
—Kimura, M. “The neutral theory of molecular evolution: a review of recent evidence.” Japanese Journal of Genetics

But that’s not the only problem with the critique. McCarthy’s calculation is correct for the number of mutations that enter the population. That tells you precisely nothing about whether those mutations can actually complete fixation across the entire reproducing population within the available time. He has confused mutation with fixation, as do the vast majority of biologists who attempt to address these mathematical challenges. I don’t know why they find it so difficult, as presumably these scientists are perfectly capable of communicating that they only want one burrito from Taco Bell, and not 8 billion, with their order.

McCarthy’s calculation implicitly assumes that fixation is instantaneous. He’s assuming that when a mutation appears, it has a 1/20,000 chance of succeeding, and if it succeeds, it immediately becomes fixed in 100% of the population. But this is not true. Fixation is a process that takes time. Quite often, a lot of time. Because if McCarthy had understood that he was utilizing Kimura’s fixation model in his critique, then he would known to have taken into account that the expected time to fixation of a neutral mutation is approximately 4Nₑ generations, which is around 40,000 generations for an effective population size of 10,000.

In other words, he actually INCREASED the size of the Darwillion by a factor of 25. I was using a time-to-fixation number of 1,600. He’s proposing that increasing that 1,600 to 40,000 is somehow going to reduce the improbability, which obviously is not the case. The problem is due to the fact that all fixations must propagate through actual physical reproduction. Every individual carrying the fixing allele must reproduce, their offspring must survive, those offspring must reproduce, and so on—generation after generation, for tens of thousands of generations—until the mutation reaches 100% frequency throughout the entire reproducing population.

Here’s the part that McCarthy omitted: can those 22 million mutations actually complete and become fixated through this reproductive process in 450,000 generations once they appear? Of course they can’t! Both reasons are related to the limits on natural selection and are explained in great detail in the book:

  • The Reproductive Ceiling: Selection operates through differential reproduction. For mutations to fix faster than neutral drift, carriers must outreproduce non-carriers. But humans can only produce a limited number of offspring per generation. A woman might have 10 children in a lifetime; a man might sire 100 under exceptional circumstances. This places a hard ceiling on how much selection can operate simultaneously across the genome.
  • The Bernoulli Barrier: Even if we invoke parallel fixation (many mutations fixing simultaneously), the Law of Large Numbers creates a devastating problem. As the number of simultaneously segregating beneficial loci increases, the variance in individual fitness decreases relative to the mean. Selection requires variance to operate; parallel fixation destroys the variance it needs. This constraint is hard, but purely mathematical, arising from probability theory rather than biology.

McCarthy’s second objection concerns the 2009 Nature study on E. coli:

“Unfortunately, this analysis is flawed from the jump: E. coli does not exhibit the highest mutation rate per generation; in fact, it has one of the lowest—orders of magnitude lower than humans when measured on a per-genome, per-generation basis.”

McCarthy is correct that humans have a higher per-genome mutation rate than E. coli—roughly 60-100 de novo mutations per human generation versus roughly one mutation per 1000-2400 bacterial divisions. But this observation is irrelevant. Once again, he’s confusing mutation with fixation.

I didn’t cite the E. coli study for its mutation rate but for its fixation rate: 25 mutations fixed in 40,000 generations, yielding an average of 1,600 generations per fixed mutation. These 25 mutations were not fixed sequentially—they fixed in parallel. So the 1,600-generation rate already takes parallel fixation into account.

Now, McCarthy is operating under the frame of Kimura, and he assumes that since mutations = fixations, the fact that humans mutate faster than bacteria means that they fixate faster. Except they don’t. No one has ever observed any human or even mammalian fixation faster than 1,600 generations. Even if we very generously extrapolate from the existing CCR5-delta32 mutation that underwent the most intense selection pressure ever observed, the fastest we could get, in theory, is 2,278 generations, and even that fixation will never happen because the absence of the Black Death means there is no longer any selection pressure or fitness advantage being granted by that specific mutation.

Which means that in the event neutral drift carries CCR5-delta32 the rest of the way to fixation, it will require another 37,800 generations in the event that it happens to hit on its 10 percent chance of completing fixation from its current percentage of the global population.

In short, the fact that E. coli mutate slower doesn’t change the fact that humans don’t fixate faster.

The rest of the critique is irrelevant and incorrect. I’ll address two more of his points:

Finally, there is no brake—no invisible wall—that arbitrarily halts adaptation after some prescribed amount of change. Small variations accumulate without limit. Generation after generation, those increments compound, and what begin as modest differences become profound transformations. When populations of the same species are separated by an earthly barrier—a mountain, a sea, a desert—they diverge: first into distinct varieties or subspecies, and eventually into separate species. And precisely what this process predicts is exactly what we find. Everywhere, without exception.

This is a retreat to the innumeracy of the biologist. There is absolutely a hard limit, a very visible flesh-and-blood wall, that prevents adaptation and renders natural selection almost irrelevant as a proposed mechanism for evolution. That is the reproductive barrier, which is far stronger and far more significant than the earthly barriers to which McCarthy appeals.

I don’t know why this is so hard for evolutionary enthusiasts to grasp: we actually know what the genetic distance between two different species are. We know the amount of time that it took to create that genetic gap. And there are not enough generations, not enough births, not enough reproductions, to account for ANY of the observed genetic gaps in the available amount of time.

Imagine a traveler made the same appeal in order to support his claim about his journey.

There is no brake—no invisible wall—that arbitrarily halts movement after some prescribed amount of steps. Small steps accumulate without limit. Block after block, those increments compound, and what begin as modest differences become profound transformations. When man is separated from his earthly objective—a city on a distant shore—he begins to walk, first across county lines, and then across states, over mountains, through forests, and even across deserts. And precisely what this process predicts is exactly what we find. Everywhere, without exception. That is why you must believe that I walked from New York City to Los Angeles in five minutes.

Dennis McCarthy is a very good writer. I envy the lyricism of his literary style. Hell, even Richard Dawkins, who is a lovely and engaging writer, might well envy him. But what he entirely fails to grasp is that Probability Zero isn’t an end run, as he calls it. It is an undermining, a complete demolition of the entire building.

The book is first and foremost what I like to call an end-around. It does not present a systematic attack on the facts just presented—or, for that matter, any of the vast body of empirical evidence that confirms evolution. It sidesteps entirely the biogeographical patterns that trace a continuous, unbroken organic thread that runs through all regions of the world, with the most closely related species living near each other and organic differences accruing with distance; the nested hierarchies revealed by comparative anatomy and genetics; the fossil record’s ordered succession of transitional forms (see pic); directly observed evolution in laboratories and natural populations; the frequency of certain beneficial traits (and their associated genes) in human populations, etc.

He’s absolutely correct to observe that I don’t attack or address any of those things in Probability Zero. I didn’t need to do so. It’s exactly like pointing out how I haven’t admired the arrangement of the furniture on the fifth floor or taken in the lovely view from the twentieth when I planted the explosives in the underground supports and the entire building is lying in smoking rubble. Natural selection never accounted for any of those things to which he appeals. It could not possibly have done so, and neither could genetic drift.

All those things exist, to be sure but they do not exist because of evolution by natural selection. Mr. McCarthy will need to find another mechanism to explain them. Which, of course, is something I pointed out in the book. IGM might be an answer, but perhaps there are other mechanisms, although I will caution the enthusiast that so far, every single one of the various natural possibilities suggested, including viruses, similarly fail to address the relevant reproductive constraints and therefore are not viable.

Now, all that being said, I am extremely grateful to Dennis McCarthy for his critique, because the way in which he indirectly invoked the Kimura fixation model inspired me to look directly at its core equation for the first time. Now, I knew that the model was incomplete, which is why I first created a corrective for its failure to account for overlapping generations, the Selective Turnover Coefficient. And I also knew that it was not a constant 10,000 as it is commonly utilized by biologists, because my analysis of the ancient DNA database proved that it varied between 3,300 and 10,000.

But I didn’t know that Kimura’s core equation underlying the fixation model was a burning dumpster fire that is reliant upon on a symbolic amphiboly until looking at it from this different perspective. And the result was the paper “Breaking Neutral Theory: Empirical Falsification of Effective Population-Size Invariance in Kimura’s Fixation Model.” You can read the preprint if you enjoy the deep dives into this sort of thing as I know at least three of you do. Here is the abstract:

Kimura’s neutral theory includes the famous invariance result: the expected rate of neutral substitution equals the mutation rate μ, independent of population size. This result is presented in textbooks as a general discovery about evolution and is routinely applied to species with dramatically varying population histories. It is not generally true. The standard derivation holds exactly only for a stationary Wright-Fisher population with constant effective population size. When population size varies—as it does in virtually every real species—the expected neutral substitution rate depends on the full demographic trajectory and is not equal to μ. We demonstrate this mathematically by showing that the standard derivation uses a single symbol (Ne) for two distinct quantities that are equal only under constant population size. We then show that the direction of the predicted deviation matches observed patterns in three independent mammalian comparisons: forest versus savanna elephants, mouse versus rat, and human versus chimpanzee. Kimura’s invariance is an approximation valid only under demographic stationarity, not a general law. Evolutionary calculations that apply it to species with changing population sizes are unreliable.

Let’s just say neutral theory is no longer a viable retreat for the Neo-Darwinians. The math is real. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the math is the only reality, but it is definitely the one thing you cannot ever ignore if you want to avoid having all your beautiful theories and assumptions and beliefs destroyed in one fell swoop.

Probability Zero will be in print next week. You can already preorder the print edition at NDM Express. And for an even deeper dive into the evolutionary science, The Frozen Gene will be available in ebook format, although whether it will be on Amazon or not is yet to be determined. And finally, I’ll address the comments from McCarthy’s post in a separate post.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Substantive Critique of PZ

Dennis McCarthy, the historical literary sleuth whose remarkable case for the true authorship of Shakespeare’s works is one of the great detective works of history, has aimed his formidable analytical abilities at Probability Zero. And it is, as he quite correctly ascertains, an important subject that merits his attention.

I believe this is one of my more important posts—not only because it explains evolution in simple, intuitive terms, making clear why it must be true, but because it directly refutes the core claims of Vox Day’s best-selling book Probability Zero: The Mathematical Possibility of Evolution by Natural Selection. Day’s adherents are now aggressively pushing its claims across the internet, declaring evolution falsified. As far as I am aware, this post is the only thorough and effective rebuttal to its mathematical analyses currently available.

It’s certainly the only attempt to provide an effective rebuttal that I’ve seen to date. Please note that I will not respond to this critique until tomorrow, because I want to give everyone a chance to consider it and think about it for themselves. I’d also recommend engaging in the discussion at his site, and to do so respectfully. I admire Mr. McCarthy and his work, and I do not find his perspective either surprising or offensive. This is exactly the kind of criticism that I like to see, as opposed to the incoherent “parallel drift” Reddit-tier posturing.

The book is first and foremost what I like to call an end-around. It does not present a systematic attack on the facts just presented—or, for that matter, any of the vast body of empirical evidence that confirms evolution. It sidesteps entirely the biogeographical patterns that trace a continuous, unbroken organic thread that runs through all regions of the world, with the most closely related species living near each other and organic differences accruing with distance; the nested hierarchies revealed by comparative anatomy and genetics; the fossil record’s ordered succession of transitional forms (see pic); directly observed evolution in laboratories and natural populations; the frequency of certain beneficial traits (and their associated genes) in human populations, etc.

Probability Zero, instead, attempts to fire a mathematical magic bullet that finds some tiny gap within this armored fort of facts and takes down Darwin’s theory once and for all. No need to grapple with biology, geology, biogeography, fossils, etc., the math has pronounced it “impossible,” so that ends that.

Probability Zero advances two principal mathematical arguments intended to show that the probability of evolution is—as its title suggests—effectively zero. One centers on the roughly 20 million mutations that have become fixed (that is, now occur in 100% of the population) in the human lineage since our last common ancestor with chimpanzees roughly 9 million years ago. Chimpanzees have experienced a comparable number of fixed mutations.

Day argues that this is impossible given the expected number of mutations arising each generation and the probability that any particular neutral mutation reaches fixation—approximately 1 in 20,000, based on estimates of ancestral human population size. Beneficial mutations do have much higher fixation probabilities, but the vast majority of these ~20 million substitutions are neutral.

Read the whole thing there. Mr. McCarthy is familiar with the relevant literature and he is not an innumerate biologist, which is what makes this discussion both interesting and relevant.

As I said before, I will refrain from saying anymore here or on SG, and I will refrain from commenting there, until I provide my own response tomorrow. But I will say that I owe a genuine debt to Mr. McCarthy for drawing my attention to something I’d overlooked…

DISCUSS ON SG

A 60-Year-Old Book Review

A review of the 1966 Wistar Symposium about which I have written in Probability Zero:

Evolution: What Is Required of a Theory?
Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.

A symposium, Philadelphia, April 1966.

The idea of this symposium is supposed to have originated from a discussion at two picnics in Switzerland, when four mathematicians, Schutzenberger, Ulam, Weisskopf, and Eden, had a discussion with the biologists Kaplan and Koprowski on mathematical doubts concerning the Darwinian theory of evolution. After heated debates it was proposed “that a symposium be arranged to consider the points of dispute more systematically, and with a more powerful array of biologists who could function adequately in the universe of discourse inhabited by the mathematicians.“ During the course of the symposium further heat was generated.

It is not easy to summarize the case made by the mathematicians,(1) which involves both the challenge that computer simulation of evolution shows evolutionary theory to be inadequate and a complaint that the biologist has not provided sufficient information for efficient computer simulation. Eden was particularly concerned with the clement of randomness which is claimed to provide the mutational variation upon which evolution depends. “No currently existing formal language,” he contends, “can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed. Any changes must be syntactically lawful ones.” He therefore conjectures that “what one might call ‘genetic grammaticality’ has a deterministic explanation and docs not owe its stability to selection pressure acting on random variation.” He points out that attempts to provide for computer learning by random variation have been unsuccessful, and that an adequate theory of adaptive evolution would supply a computer programmer with a correct set of ground rules.

Schutzenberger takes a more extreme position. Arguing that all genetic information should consist of a rather limited set of words in an alphabet of 20-odd letters—in which evolution is typographical change—he finds a need for algorithms “in which the very concept of syntactic correctness has been incorporated.” He compares this “syntactic topology” with the “phenotypic topology” of organisms as physical objects in space-time, and a major part of his challenge to neo-Darwinian theory is “the present lack of a conceivable mechanism which would insure within an interesting range the faintest amount of matching between the two topologies. . . an entirely new set of rules is needed to obtain the sort of correspondence which is assumed to hold between neighbouring phenotypes. . .“

A major part of the biologists’ answer to this challenge was in the claim that the neo-Darwinian theory used in computer models, based on the Haldane-Fisher-Wright interpretation of 1920-1930, misses out those forces which lead to continuing evolution, such as continued environmental change, the heterogeneous environment, epigenetic organization of phenotypes, and the progressive elaboration of the types of mutation possible. (2) Waddington presented the main elements of a theory of phenotypes involving canalized processes of development (with switching mechanisms), the heritability of developmental responses to environmental stimuli, and a principle of “Archetypes,” inbuilt characteristics of an evolving group which determine the directions in which evolutionary change is especially easy. Realistic models would need to build in these elements.(3) Many of the papers by biologists in this volume are peripheral(4) to the theme stated by the mathematicians, providing an accompaniment of sophisticated evolutionary theory rather than a counterpoint to the mathematical challenge.

Most biologists are satisfied with a theory that can be tested and that proves predictive. It is a different challenge to a theory that it should have an effective working model, for failure may imply either imperfection in the theory or imperfection in the model. It is doubtful whether this symposium has done much to influence the theory of evolution; it may have done much to improve future models.

It must have been tremendous fun to attend this symposium, but the full record of argument and interruption is very irritating to at least one reader. An interchange between speakers which runs X “No,” Y “No, no,” X “O.K. let’s waste time,” Y “We understand the question,” Z “The answer is no” surely needs no record in the literature of science. The short pre- and post-conference papers included in the volume arc excellent succinct expressions of points of view, but much of the main text reads like a word-for-word record of a heckled political meeting. This may be a useful way to discuss problems in science; it is not the way to publish them.

John L. Harper

School of Plant Biology, University College of North Wales, Bangor

Uncle John’s Band added a few footnotes as commentary. I added a fourth one.

  1. As predicted by Probability Zero, the biologist reviewer struggles with mathematical arguments. They are well-summarized by Day.
  2. It isn’t an exaggeration to say the biological counterargument consisted of what was for all intents and purposes, magic. When they weren’t replying at all.
  3. Still no compulsion to, you know, do an experiment It’s all thoughts and fancies.
  4. Peripheral indeed. Peripheral was the polite way to say: they didn’t respond in any way, shape, or form to the mathematical criticism.

DISCUSS ON SG

No Chance At All

The Band reviews Probability Zero:

Probability Zero demolishes TENS so utterly, the preface should be “PULL!”

This is the first version of a new book by Vox Day that demonstrates the mathematical impossibility of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection [TENS]. Given how big the House of Lies and reality-facing counterculture are around here, it demands attention. There may not be a more important pillar for its entire fake ontology.

Probability Zero strikes the heart of what the setup post called conflict between The Science! and the Scientific Method. This matters for more than intellectual reasons. Readers know personal responsibility is a priority around here. But we also live in a complex socio-culture that has unavoidable influence on us. From basic things, like adding tax and regulatory burdens to organic community demands. Up to the fundamental beliefs that set the public ethos…

Probability Zero starts by setting aside the religious and philosophical arguments, just like The Science! does. It accepts the discourse on its terms, by adhering to the “scientific” arguments it claims to adhere to. To be defined by. Full concession of TENS huffing’s own epistemological standards. Then lays out the mathematical parameters claimed to be involved in the TENS process. No additional yeah, buts. Just what is accepted in the literature. And then lets the logical realities of math blow the whole mess into a smoking crater so apocalyptically vast, I’ll never be able to see biologists the same way again.

There’s no need to recap the statistical arguments, they’re clear and complete. The kernel is that if mutations take an amount of time to appear and fix, that much time has to be available for the theory to be possible.

This was clear when MITTENS was pointed out. Even before it had a name. General conditions of possibility make it obvious once seen. But the full demonstration lights up that gulf between The Science! and science as modes of knowledge production. The whole point of science is empirical conformation and abstract reasoning in concert. Day’s observation that evolutionary biologists have replaced experimentation with pure modeling was legitimately surprising. Apparently there still was a bar, however low. Not anymore.

Consider what problems innumeracy might present for pure modelers. Because the level is staggering. To the point where a simple arithmetic mean is incomprehensible. No hyperbole. Probability Zero describes blank stares when asked for the average rate of mutation. The ongoing idiocy over parallel vs. sequential mutation is illustrative. The total number of mutations separating species includes all of them. Parallel, sequential, or however else. Hence the word “total”. And dividing “total” by “amount of time” gives a simple, unweighted average number. The rate.

I’m not exaggerating. There was always the joke that biologists were fake scientists that couldn’t do math. Easier for premed GPAs too. But the assumption was that it was relative. Lighter than physics or chemistry, but still substantial compared to social sciences or the arts. And that would be wrong. There are some computational sub-fields of biology. Assuming they’re legit, they clearly aren’t working in evolution.

Read the whole thing there. He has several very illuminating examples of historical evo-fluffery, including one page of a manuscript that I’m going to put up here as a separate post, simply because it demands seeing in order to believe it.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Question of Content

I have a lot of additional data that isn’t going to go in the book, and tends to be much more on the technical side. For example, this is the latest thing I’ve been running down, not because it’s necessary to any of the points I’m making, but because I’m interested in the tangential element that appeared in one of the necessary investigations.

  • Show the sex composition of Neolithic vs Modern samples (if very different, Y-chromosome artifacts are confirmed)
  • Check each outlier SNP individually with sex breakdowns
  • Flag if females have Y-chromosome data (impossible, means data quality issue)

I don’t really want to start yet another site devoted to this stuff, but I don’t want to bore everyone here to tears either. So, would a daily post on the science marginalia be of interest here, or should I try to find a different solution until I inevitably get bored of this sort of thing?

I very much appreciate the strong support that has been shown by everyone here in making Probability Zero a multi-category bestseller. But I also know that it’s not necessarily the content for which most people come here.

DISCUSS ON SG

Rethinking Human Evolution Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISCUSS ON SG

Under the Sea

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

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

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

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

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

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Where Biologists Fear to Tread

The Redditors don’t even hesitate. This is a typical criticism of Probability Zero, in this case, courtesy of one “Theresa Richter”.

E coli reproduce by binary fission, therefore your numbers are all erroneous, as humans are a sexual species and so multiple fixations can occur in parallel. Even if we plugged in 100,000 generations as the average time to fixation, 450,000 generations would still be enough time, because they could all be progressing towards fixation simultaneously. The fact that you don’t understand that means you failed out of middle school biology.

This is a perfect example of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome in action. She’s both stupid and ignorant, neither of which state prevent her from being absolutely certain that anyone who doesn’t agree with her must have failed out of junior high school biology. Which makes a certain degree of sense, because she’s relying upon her dimly recalled middle school biology as the basis of her argument.

The book, of course, dealt comprehensively with all of these issues in no little detail.

First, E. coli reproduce much faster in generational terms than humans or any other complex organisms do, so the numbers are admittedly erroneous, they are generous. Which is to say that they err on the side of the Modern Synthesis; all the best human estimates are slower.

Second, multiple fixations do occur in parallel. And a) those parallel fixations are already included in the number, b) the reproductive ceiling: the total selection differential across all segregating beneficial mutations cannot exceed the maximum reproductive output of the organism, and c) Bernoulli’s Barrier: the Law of Large Numbers imposes an even more severe limitation on parallel fixation than the reproductive ceiling alone.

Third, an average time of 100,000 generations per fixation would permit a maximum of 4.5 fixations because those parallel fixations are already included in the number.

Fourth, there aren’t 450,000 generations. Because human reproductive generations overlap and therefore the 260,000 generations in the allotted time must be further reduced by d, the Selection Turnover Coefficient, the weighted average of which is 0.804 across the entirety of post-CHLCA history, to 209,040 generations.

Note to PZ readers: yes, the work continues. Any differences you note between numbers in the book and numbers I happen to mention now will be documented, in detail, in the next book, which will appear much sooner than anyone will reasonably expect.

Now, here’s the irony. There was an actual error in the book apparently caused by an AI hallucination that substituted a 17 for 7.65 for no discernible reason that anyone can ascertain. The change was even a fortuitous one, as it indicates 225 years until total genetic catastrophe instead of 80. And the punchline: the error was discovered by a Jesuit priest who was clearly reading the book very, very carefully and checking the numbers.

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The Confirmation of IGM

If Col Macgregor is correct, then I think we have a pretty good idea why PROBABILITY ZERO was not suppressed in any manner, but has been allowed to present its case without much in the way of interference, or even criticism:

BREAKING: Bank of England told to prepare for a market crash if the United States announces Alien Life. Helen McCaw who served as a senior analyst in financial security at the UK’s central bank sounded the alarm. She has now written to Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, urging him to organize contingencies for the possibility that the White House may confirm we are not alone in the universe.

This would explain a lot of anomalies about all the high weirdness that has surrounded geopolitics over the last 2-3 years, from the fake Bidens and Trumps to the bizarre imperial expansionism of the fake Trump administration.

The thing is, the discovery of alien-human interaction has been pretty close to inevitable ever since the onset of full genome mapping. Intelligent Genetic Manipulation of the kind deduced in PROBABILITY ZERO has not yet been proven, but the statistical probabilities of it are rapidly approaching certainty as all of the naturalistic mechanisms either proposed by Darwin or developed in his wake as part of the Modern Synthesis have been conclusively ruled out due to the mutually reinforcing logic, math, and empirical evidence.

Once genetic scientists are able to look closely enough at anomalies such as the split chromosome and other indicators of genetic engineering that we now know to have almost certainly taken place at some point in the past, they’re going to discover some high-tech version of our existing CRISPR technology.

And they may already be able to identify it; if I have learned one thing from my forays into the biological sciences, it is that scientists are the very last people who are going to discover very big things outside their little boxes, because they are the very definition of people who can’t see the forest for the bark on one specific tree. We can’t reasonably assume that they don’t have the technology to identify it because they’ve literally never even considered looking for it, much less engaged in a systematic and methodical search for the signs of it.

At least, not as far as we’ve been informed, anyhow. Either way, we’re much closer to the empirical confirmation of IGM than the mathematicians of Wistar were to the empirical confirmation of the impossibility of evolution by natural selection and neutral drift in 1966.

And remember, it’s not going to be as simple as aliens = demons or not. There are a whole range of various possibilities and combinations, so if you’re going to seriously contemplate these sorts of things, you absolutely need to set both your dogmatic assumptions and your binary thinking aside.

DISCUSS ON SG