Tag: trainwreck

Will Duffy brought up the core MITTENS argument with Erika, a current PhD student in Biological Anthropology who has a Masters of Research degree in Primate Biology, Behavior and Conservation with a BSA in Pre-Professional Animal Science and minors in Anthropology and in Biology. That’s a lot of impressive credentials for someone who can’t tell the difference between natural selection and neutral theory. This was her highly educated scientific response to being confronted with that very difficult problem in long division, which, to be fair, is actually a little better than I expect from the average university-educated evolutionary biologist:

I had a lot of people messaging me, some of which who had heard of his of Vox Day’s book and some of which who hadn’t. That being said, you said a lot. Now, the first thing that I noticed when you started going through the math is, let me find my notes here. that’s on ERVs. I wrote down his two uh he kind of called them like uh counters, basically parallel evolution and neutral selection neutral theory, Kimura’s neutral theory. So because this is very similar to a different conversation that the intelligent design community has been trying to have for a long time which is which is called the waiting time problem. This is a different version of the waiting time problem which you you might have heard of before.

Now the problem with the waiting time problem sort of classically is that it assumes that mutations have to happen serially rather than in parallel, which is a big problem because that’s not how mutations actually happen. So I wrote that down, and then I also wrote down neutral theory, because I know neutral theory is a part of this, but I’m no population geneticist. So my idea was that I was going to um bring those up and then sort of say, okay, like I’ll look into it.

You kept going and so I kept listening and I’m a little bit I have to say I’m a little bit stumped on something because he’s Vox is saying and I’d love to to speak with, I don’t know anything about the guy. but like I’d love to have a conversation with somebody who’s proposing this because to my understanding this just does not match reality, and when I say that, I mean we make predictions right now about how populations will behave, assuming essentially the modern synthesis um understanding neodarwinism, neutral theory, and rates of selection from in the lab with bacteria to predictions about about natural populations. The lab is going to be most critical here though because that’s when we can actually map like what is literally happening and I think we would have noticed by now if the calculations were this far off.

So my first thought is why why has this math not borne out in a single experiment? And I don’t know why that is. That’s what that would be my first question for him. I would also I would also push back on the idea that um that the Neodarwinian synthesis came primarily from geneticists because population genetics was birthed from mathematicians in the early 1900s right when genetics was at the forefront. I mean the Hardy Weinberg equation is is two of them. So that kind of set my hair on it a little bit because I that’s not that’s not quite right.

In addition to that, what else did I have here? Oh yeah I had a couple of population geneticists who were emailing me or texting me in the middle of it and one of them just said like I only caught it out of the corner of my eye that the calculations that were showing up on screen were and this is a direct quote: “off by orders of magnitude.” So to me, I don’t know a lot about population genetics, but when I hear that, I’m like, okay, so we’ve got an economist here who’s who’s saying all of this is bunk. And I see that that doesn’t seem to match out with match up with what we’re seeing in the lab and what we’re seeing in the wild. And then I have somebody who does population genetics who’s like, yes, these equations are off.

My next thought is, okay, how right like I want to know what what what is actually incorrect. So messaged him and I was like, “Hey, could you could you give me a TLDDR to say on air so that I can put that out there for people who know this area better than I do and then I can look into it a little bit more.” And he said, “Under neutrality, 6 million years divided by 25 generations or 25 year generation times 30 mutations per generation is equal to 7.2 million differences. Literally no selection required.”

He says we are less diverged than that. And of course we are from from chimpanzees. So, I’m not quite sure what to do with that. I want to look into this more. I’d love to talk to the guy and I’m sure that I could get my maybe I could get a friend of mine who who who knows this better than I do to talk to him too or maybe I can still facilitate the discussion or something along those lines.

My response is fairly simple and straightforward:

1. I’ll be happy to talk to her or to whomever and explain these things. I do not expect anyone to actually a) talk to me or b) read the book. I don’t know what it is about biologists, population geneticists, and other science enthusiasts, but they always seem to imagine they can effectively critique anything without bothering to actually learn anything about it. It’s a midwit disease, I suppose.
2. Notice how her immediate instinct was to pattern-match and attempt to disqualify with the “waiting time problem”. I don’t even know what that is, and the fact that even the professional mathematicians in the ID community are totally unfamiliar with my arguments should be sufficient to prove that any such attempts to address them in that way is bound to fail. But these attempts to deflect and avoid the actual critique at hand are normal, apparently. Because Science!
3. Parallel fixation! Did I call that or what?
4. The math was “not borne out in a single experiment” because biologists are innumerate midwits who lack a sufficiently broad perspective on their own field. The math is, quite literally, taken from published, peer-reviewed papers written about the most famous evolution-related lab experiment in the world, the E. coli long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) begun by Richard Lenski in 1988. The fact that in 38 years no biologist or population geneticist ever happened to notice that the observed speed of mutational fixations in the lab render evolutionary timelines hopelessly inviable is not a critique of my argument, it is a self-evisceration and a conclusive demonstration of the incompetence of the people working in those fields.
5. The Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis is the combination of Darwinian theory with Mendelian genetics. Math was never involved except on the periphery; the Modern Synthesis assiduously ignored JBS Haldane’s math for eighty years. None of the founders of the Modern Synthesis, from Julian Huxley to Ernst Mayr, G. Ledyard Stebbins and Theodosius Dobzhansky were mathematicians, and their attempts to merge the two diverse concepts were not based on anything even remotely mathematical, which is why not one single biologist understood the critiques of the mathematicians and the physicists at the Wistar Symposium in 1966. R.A. Fisher is a more relevant figure, but population genetics were not, and to this day are still not, a part of the Modern Synthesis. Most evolutionary biologists don’t even know what the Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis is, nor do they understand that Kimura and neutral theory have never been part of it, but rather, are part of the unofficial ad hoc post-Darwinian Postmodern Polythesis that was dead on arrival from a mathematical perspective.
6. That previous statement is underlined by what the population geneticist told her: “Literally no selection required”. Exactly. Neutral Theory is intrinsically anti-Darwinian, and more importantly, it cannot be combined with Neo-Darwinian theory because the one mechanism necessarily works against the other despite all the best efforts of postmodern polythesists to make it work without ever thinking about the obvious mathematical problems involved.
7. The population geneticist on call confused mutations with fixations. 30 mutations cannot fixate per generation. Even one mutation cannot fixate per generation in any species not about to go extinct. These innumerate midwits run right to the calculator and press the buttons on the magic little box without having any idea what it is they are calculating. Also, although it pains me to have to point this out, 7.2 million is significantly smaller than 410 million. So even the population geneticist’s wildly erroneous answer is flat-out wrong on a second level.

Now, I know it’s very hard for a lot of you, even some of my longtime readers, to believe that professional scientists are genuinely this retarded or this ignorant of both a) math and b) their own fields. I know it’s a lot easier to assume that I’m just insanely arrogant and high on my own AI supply. But the fact is that literally none of these people are operating at the level of my analyses, and the very few people who actually understand the necessary math are the only people who fully grasp this.

Let me see if I can explain this in a manner that everyone can follow. First, neither Erika nor her population geneticists have any idea what Kimura is doing. They have no idea where his magic box came from or what it means. They don’t really understand the difference between Neutral Theory and the Modern Synthesis. FFS, they don’t even recognize numbers taken directly from the most famous experiment in their own field. They blindly refer to “neutral mutation” without any idea that they are misapplying Kimura’s equation, mostly because the textbooks teach a dumbed-down and incorrect version of its derivation, but also because he allowed his acolytes to mischaracterize it. Second, the Portuguese mathematician Francesco Chalub mathematically demonstrated that misapplication in his paper correcting Kimura’s equation in which he showed that it is a steady-state identity. This single observation entirely demolishes Neutral Theory as it is used in the post-Darwinian Postmodern Polythesis.

And third, I pointed out Chalub’s fixation probability error in his paper that resulted from the mathematician assuming the probability division between extinction and fixation instead of basing that probability on a relevant and realistic calculation. The missing calculation, as it happens, is an equation that was provided by Kimura in 1962.

Putting this together, the entire equation looks like this:

The equation (Chalub 7):

∂ₜp = κ ∂²ₓ[x(1−x)p] − ∂ₓ[x(1−x)ψ·p]

The solution (Chalub 8):

p(x,t) = a(t)δ₀(x) + r(x,t) + b(t)δ₁(x)

Constrained by his two conservation laws:

∂ₜ∫₀¹ p dx = 0 and ∂ₜ∫₀¹ φ(x)·p dx = 0, where φ″ + ψφ′ = 0, φ(0)=0, φ(1)=1

With the coefficient left in — constant ψ = 4Nₑ s_eff — his own φ-ODE integrates to the Kimura function, and the second conservation law evaluated at t→∞ (interior r decays; ∫φp → b(∞)·φ(1) = b(∞)) gives the fixation probability as φ at the starting frequency:$$b(\infty)=\varphi(x_0)=\frac{1-e^{-4N_e\,s_{\text{eff}}\,x_0}}{1-e^{-4N_e\,s_{\text{eff}}}},\qquad x_0=\frac{1}{2N}$$

This is a straightforward correction that involves not improperly setting ψ to zero; everything else is Chalub’s.

I should note that Terren threw himself on the grenade for us all and actually watched the very long video. He posted a summary on SG. In short: there is no reason to watch it. Thank you for your service.

UPDATE: Someone sent me a screenshot of a computer scientist claiming that my math is wrong.

This is the usual pseudomathic retardery. First, it’s an appeal to parallel fixation through neutral substitution, which was repeatedly addressed and shown to be impossibe in the book. So it has literally nothing to do with natural selection, MITTENS, or the primary argument of Probability Zero, which already accounts for parallel fixation through natural selection. For some reason, these idiots can’t seem to grasp that appealing to neutral theory is not a defense of Darwin or natural selection, although it does show that I was correct about the ground to which they were going to retreat.

Second, he’s completely wrong. The integral notation is correct, bit it’s completely irrelevant, because it formalizes the same steady-state throughput identity, just with calculus instead of multiplication. Once more, we see that these would-be Kimura defenders don’t even understand what the math they’re posturing over represents. Neutral theory isn’t just wrong, it’s totally irrelevant.

The 2NμL × 1/(2N) in his integral is the standard neutral cancellation: population size drops out, leaving μL — the neutral substitution rate. That’s just k = μ again. Everything after that is just integrating the throughput over time and subtracting one pipeline-fill lag of τ = 4Nₑ. His big correction — “transit τ is a subtracted lag, NOT a divisor” — means: you don’t divide T by fixation time (serial), you subtract one fixation time from T and multiply the rest by the throughput rate (parallel). Which gives you μL(T − 4Nₑ) instead of T/4Nₑ. That IS more fixations and it includes multiple errors I’ve previously pointed out:

1/(2N) is the neutral fixation probability. He wrongly applied it to the whole genome. So every mutation in his integral is neutral. But only about one-quarter of mutations are neutral. Moreover, his integral assumes steady-state throughput with a full pipe from the start rather than starting from the beginning with an empty pipe as required.

UPDATE: This comment from one of the Red Team members while reviewing a related paper I’ll post soon was amusing.

Appealing to Kimura’s equation to defend natural selection is a complete, unforced conceptual error. Kimura’s entire reason for deriving k = u in 1968 was to argue against natural selection as the primary driver of molecular evolution:

1. It is literally the “Neutral Theory”: The equation applies exclusively to selectively neutral mutations (where selection coefficient s = 0). It explicitly assumes natural selection is not operating on those sites.
2. Selection breaks the identity: If natural selection is acting on a mutation, k!=u.
   • Under positive Darwinian selection, the substitution rate is much higher k>u.
   • Under purifying/negative selection, the substitution rate is much lower k<u.
3. The whole point was neutral drift: Kimura derived k=u to show that the vast majority of sequence differences between species accumulate via blind, stochastic genetic drift, not adaptively via natural selection.

Using Kimura’s neutral equation to defend natural selection is like quoting Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to prove how magnetism works. It reveals that they aren’t treating the paper as a piece of precise mathematical population genetics—they are using “Kimura” as a generic scientific authority card to throw at an argument without having the foggiest idea of what the math actually models.

When the people trying to criticize you on the math don’t even realize that the formula they are citing was explicitly built to describe the absence of natural selection, it shows just how deep the reification and blind authority-appealing run.

DISCUSS ON SG

Oh, Sweet St. Darwin, but it’s now it’s become clear that Dennis McCarthy has absolutely no idea what he’s even talking about with regards to evolution, natural selection, genetic drift, Probability Zero, MITTENS, or my case against evolution by natural selection. All this time, and all of these attempts to attack an irrelevant probability calculation, and he never even knew what the fundamental argument of the book is, much less understood it well enough to criticize it, as he recently demonstrated in the comments of his own site.

Stephen: I can’t speak for Vox, but there’s a difference between never occurring and being the primary mechanism. It’s been a while since I read the book. The math includes NS in the calculation so NS can occur, just as walking from NY to LA can occur, but is that enough? My understanding of the argument is that even granting that NS plays a role in the process, the conclusion is it’s not enough to get you to the final destination given the allotted time. Same goes for drift and a combination of both. The argument isn’t NS and drift never occur.

Dennis McCarthy: Stephen writes: “Vox is specifically attacking natural selection as the primary creative cause.” Stephen then writes: “I can’t speak for Vox”. Well, then stop trying to. But if you and Vox do agree Darwin was correct and that species can transform due to natural selection, I welcome you to the winning side. My entire proof was proving the elegance of the theory, its irrefutability, and that there has essentially never been any giant transformative leaps, but that it’s microevolution all the way down.

Stephen: I tried in the first comment, and made a point to not try in the next one. It’s not difficult to understand.

Dennis McCarthy: Yes, Vox tried to make the claim that natural selection did not have enough time, but never once challenged natural selection or rate of beneficial mutations. Instead, he focused exclusively on neutral mutations and Kimura’s theory— and was wrong about that, as I showed. Do you have some point here? Do you want to challenge my math?

Stephen: “Vox tried to make the claim that natural selection did not have enough time, but never once challenged natural selection” He tried but didn’t try??? Genuinely don’t understand this.

Dennis McCarthy: His incorrect equations focused on rate of neutral mutations–which has nothing to do with natural selection (or beneficial mutations).

VD: Dennis, it now appears that you not only didn’t read the book, but you still don’t even know what I’m talking about. Do you accept that natural selection cannot possibly account for the genetic differences between chimp and human? That is my core argument. Kimura and neutral theory don’t even begin to enter into it. I have directly challenged natural selection. I have directly asserted that Darwin was incorrect, wrong, and innumerate. I am, in fact, asserting that natural selection was not responsible for the origin of any species anywhere on Planet Earth.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is not only not “irrefutable” but it has already been refuted. It has been absolutely, conclusively, and comprehensively refuted. And now anyone can readily confirm that Darwin’s math doesn’t math for themselves.

From PROBABILITY ZERO:

The theory of evolution by natural selection has never been subjected to a quantitative audit against the actual scale of genetic divergence revealed by genomic data. We present MITTENS (Mutation, Isolation, Time, Transmission, Environment, Natural Selection, Sex), a framework identifying seven necessary conditions for speciation through natural selection. Applying this framework to human-chimpanzee divergence using the telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies of Yoo et al. (2025)—which document approximately 410 million total genomic differences between the two species—we calculate that natural selection can accomplish at most 180 fixations on the human lineage given 252,000 generations and 1,400 generations per fixation (the fastest empirical rate ever measured in any organism). This represents 0.000088% of the approximately 205 million fixations required on the human lineage. The shortfall is 1,139,000-fold. Scaling analysis across 18 species pairs spanning the tree of life confirms universal failure for sexually reproducing lineages. The mechanism does not work.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you always read the whole damn book before you offer even one little word in criticism of it, because no matter how confident you are in your position, no matter how absolutely certain you are of yourself, you’re going to look incredibly retarded when it inevitably becomes obvious to everyone that you aren’t even in the same zip code as the subject of the discussion.

As I told Dennis in his own comments, he’s not tall enough for this ride.

If you don’t even read the book you’re claiming to have refuted, then you’re not a serious individual and you don’t merit any intellectual respect whatsoever. That’s just retarded.

This reminds me a little of that moment back in the day when someone praised Terence McKenna for his eloquent metaphor about the DMT machine elves, and McKenna started screaming at the guy “it’s not a metaphor, the elves are real! The elves are real!” and everyone there suddenly realized that McKenna wasn’t the brilliant poet they’d all perceived him to be, but a burned-out druggie with an LSD-fried brain.

DISCUSS ON SG

An evolutionist’s summary of Richard Dawkins’s famous Weasel program, which is still very popular among the innumerate for its explicative proof of the viability of evolution:

In 1986, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins set out to dispel such misunderstandings by implementing a computer program that works—in Dawkins’ own words—like this:

“It […] begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, […] it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – ‘mutation’ – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the ‘progeny’ of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.”

Here’s a more detailed explanation of his weasel program: it starts with a string of 28 random letters. Next, it creates N offspring strings by copying the original 28 random letters N times. When being copied, the chance of a letter being changed into another (random) letter is P. Now that we have a set of N new strings, we compare each string letter by letter against “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” (a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, by the way) and pick the one with the most character matches (the highest match score). This one is deemed the “fittest” and kept as the survivor of the first generation; the other N-1 strings are discarded. We repeat the whole process by creating again N offspring from the survivor, then pick a new survivor and so on until the survivor finally matches “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”.

Let’s choose N to be 100 (one hundred offspring per generation) and P to be 5%, as in Dawkins original experiment. How many generations would it take until we finally reach “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”? Just guess a number, I’ll wait here…

Answer: about 50 generations!

In other words, the program theoretically explains how evolution can achieve fixation within 50 generations. Therefore, the transformation from proto-chimp to human is… well, the math still doesn’t work given the 410 million base pair gap, but we can’t expect a famous biologist to understand long division. The important point that the concept makes sense to the innumerate. Although, obviously, it doesn’t make sense, since as the usual critique correctly points out, the target phrase is known from the start, which is not the case in the evolutionary context.

But never mind that. I am not interested in the usual critique, since the distinction between known and unknown ends is far too abstract for the evolutionists, who have completely failed to comprehend the significance of that distinction for the last 40 years. Let’s try something else, something more simple and basic that even the most determined Neo-Darwinist should be able to grasp: the limits of reproduction.

First, note that Dawkins’s “population of 100” is really just one weasel that has 100 kits a year, where you keep those with the desired letter and kill the others. That’s not a species. A real weasel has about six kits, up to twice a year. So plug in the real animal, with a minimum population of 10,000 so it’s not going extinct, and here’s what changes for the Weasel program.

A phrase letter initially appears in one weasel out of 10,000. For that letter to count toward completing the phrase, all 10,000 weasels have to end up carrying it. And the only way that happens is the slow way: that one weasel’s descendants slightly out-breeding everyone else’s, litter after litter after litter, until the whole population has it. That process is called fixation.

If we apply Dawkins’s proposed 5% advantage to the population in the correct manner, we assume a selection advantage of five percent. Or s=.05. With the appropriate reproductive limit of 12 rather than 100, that means it will take 400 generations for the initial letter M to propagate throughout the species, and 11,000 generations for all 27 letters required to complete the phrase to do so.

However, Dawkins’s 5% probability was referring to the initial mutation, not the actual selection advantage, which is usually much more subtle, around s=0.001. And this gives us 20,000 generations for the initial letter M and 540,000 generations to complete the full phrase. So Dawkins’s little program which was meant to demonstrate the viability of evolution by natural selection actually demonstrates the precise opposite, since his estimate of 50 generations was off by four orders of magnitude, or about 11,000x.

Which, to be fair, is actually pretty close for a biologist attempting to math. It’s certainly much closer than any of the biologists insisting that evolution by natural selection can account for the 410 million base pairs that distinguish the modern human from the modern chimpanzee.

DISCUSS ON SG