Storytime's End

Reviewing the second installment of The Mathematics of Evolution

Turned out not to be the best time for delays. Readers know my schedule can be irregular, but it’s a drag when there’s a lot going on. This will wrap the review of Vox Day’s Mathematics of Evolution with a look at The Frozen Gene, the second of the pair. I mentioned it in an earlier post, but wanted a post to focus on it.

Freeze Frame

The prior one set some context and talked about the Bernoulli Barrier. A property of large numbers that prevents the bulk mutation fixation rates needed to make the numbers work. But there’s a lot more. The delay between books meant The Frozen Gene could consider some of the bleating around Probability Zero.

Take Kimura. Please. This bit of legerdemain pulled one of The Science!’s favorite tricks. Replacing a failed theory while claiming to refine it. Neutral theory holds that there is no selection pressure. Mutations occur randomly and drift through the population. The math shows this is much slower. Would that the trillions and trillions of years really were in play. More seriously, removing “natural selection” from evolution means nothing selects out harmful mutations. And since they occur more frequently statistically… More later. Drift kills 100-300 times faster than it accumulates the needed positives.

The idea of “parallel drift” is quickly shot down as proof of oxymoron. Put the large numbers aside for a moment. Parallel fixation claims selection pressure pushes random occurrences into non-random configurations. Drift is random. It has no force to push things into parallel structures. Or else it isn’t random. It’s guided.

These idiotic logic failures are stock-in-trade for the evolutionary biologists. Calling them innumerate may be too generous. Non-numeric logic seems equally out of reach. “Parallel drift” is an admission. Like asking pagan priests to logically prove their myths. They can’t. Applying logic to this drivel is a category error. They spam “fixes” without understanding the systemic whole. Any change has to be tracked through the relational networks.

Kimura proves to be the gift that keeps giving. One sad Gamma attempted a quasi-authorized rebuttal of Probability Zero’s mathematical argument. But not just any Gamma. This one gained notoriety with the clever idea of solving the Shakespeare authorship problem with plagiarism software. But not quite the display of bandwidth for epistemological paradigm-shifts. Ironically, blasting this feeble effort out of the water uncovered another coffin nail for TENS.

Kimura produced a magical formula that claimed substitution rate and mutation rate are equal regardless of population size. Turns out our Newton used the same variable for different values. And in all that time, no one looked at the formula. Consider that we had to derive basic Math and Physics formulas in high school. But over all that time, one person from completely outside the field ever checked the numbers.

As for the plug and play fact checker. His inability to address the actual argument suggests he did the usual. But The Mathematics of Evolution explains that AIs default to narrative. It makes them unreliable for undirected counterculture work. Day had to customize his assistants to deal honestly with the House of Lies. DeepSeek never could be. So a midwit that didn’t read/understand won’t be saved by posturing over AI output. He can’t see that the AI isn’t addressing the argument either.

Interesting watching the usual narrative-huffing Gammas huff narrative at this far more tepid nibble at the larger issue.

The double count variable needed extra mention for what it says about the discipline. But that isn’t the big, eponymous reveal. The papers in the back half build to an eye-opening possibility. If random drift piles deleterious mutations faster than positive ones and TENS is mathematically not happening … what’s going on in the biosphere? Day’s calculations indicate that if genes fixed at the needed rate, a new species would emerge every 11 days. And yet in the history of botany, zoology, and related fields, not one has been observed. Just to be clear, this isn’t discovery of a previously unknown species. That happens all the time. The genesis of one. Like a new type of insect in the garden. And “none” has some heft in stats.

A couple of things. The lack of emergent species is something that’s come up in other contexts. What’s new here is the presentation of the argument. The contrast with the prediction is a slap. Especially when we compare “essentially 0” infinitesimal odds that do mathematically exist elsewhere in the book with none. Obviously there are a few spurious cases, dealt with here. Vs. every 11 days. Instead, all we’ve heard is whining about extinctions. Also, fabulists like to treat “species” as somehow meaningless. The fact species can be relatively genetically close is irrelevant. That should advantage the myth. Use the simplest definition. A new animal not viable with others every 11 days.

The great complementary strength to the math is something alien to the ways of evolutionary biology. Empirical observation. Cross-referencing theory with what record is available. The pattern in the fossil record is consistent with negative mutational load collapse. There’s no gradualism. Large animals remain the same then go extinct, not evolve into adapted forms. Animals appearing, running a course, then disappearing is totally inconsistent with any sort of “evolution”. What appears to be happening is opposite.

These time estimates also rely on estimated biological clocks. It’s quite possible the implications will chain through other just so stories.

One of the many dim-witted bioasumptions was complete population turnover every generation. Like annual plants. This is prima facie moronic. Models obviously standardize and simplify. But they have to remain accurate representations of what they’re modeling. You can’t just change the terms of something. And overlapping generations doesn’t just change the calculations. It points to modern longevity. And the removal of selection pressure from humanity.

The picture is a stark one. A frozen gene pool subject to mounting mutations. And this isn’t something curable with gene editing fantasy. It’s a degenerative property of an entropic reality. And like anything entropic, the only remedy is constant effort. Or in this case, meaningful selection pressure.

The Frozen Gene notes that the experiments verifying this prediction have yet to be run. But the notion of verification/falsification already separates it from the biological herd. Selects it, one might say. Increasing mutational load is certainly consistent with anecdotal observation. Mounting obesity does confound cross-generational comparison. Although it’s possible that’s also part of a degrading genome.

rilllW.E. Hill, “The Retort Brutal.” Puck, March 1913. Library of Congress.

This isn’t a blackpill on an individual level. Prior to modernity, it wasn’t only selection pressure culling the genomic herd. Beauty and status codes generally correlated to signs of genetic fitness. In organic communities, relative weight-pulling tended to concentrate resources with the fit. Subtle constant nudges in a positive direction almost on instinct. And high mortality around birth. Lifespans for those surviving childhood in older times surprise people. They were fit. Now consider modern attitudes. Anyhow, tick tock.

Closing observations on a remarkable intellectual accomplishment. Day’s rigor makes an informative contrast with his opponents’ slack dishonesty. Readers know I visualise idea structures. And the epistemology of evolutionary biology is a wild one.

Step 1. Pipe dream hallucination → a priori truth.

Step 2. Any critic must conclusively prove the negative.

Step 3. Any critique can be countered by an imaginary hypothetical with no evidentiary requirement.

2 & 3 cycle in a rigged game of fantasy and Gamma whatabouts vs. logic and evidence. Were this science, the onus is on the fabulist to offer replicable material evidence for their tales. Something a tad more substantial than musings on beaks.

Consider the narrative. Hand-wavingly endless years ago, amorphous clouds of “dust” coalesce into soup. Or gas. Sometimes it’s a cloud of gas. Let’s say dust and gas to be scientific. Anyhow, the soup appears, as soup does, because trillions and trillions of years. Which is fine. We’re not here to scrutinize the stories. Only two important pieces involving TENS. How the soup makes the life in the first place. And how whatever that is becomes us.

The first part is just magic so explaining isn’t necessary. The soup has the right broth. And the dust-gas also coalesced into lightning storms to reverse entropy. An amino acid manifested, as they do in lighening storms. And then that plucky little molecule just started evolving. Until it complex organic compounds appeared, which evolved into the DNA that makes evolutionary mutations possible.

Oh wait.

The DNA Code was Designed; the Decoder is the Code

Anyhow, TENS is supposed to show how magic lightning evolved into everything. Despite not actually happening because it mathematically can’t. What’s at stake is one of the main God-ruling-out cornerstones of the whole Enlightenment self-deifying House of Lies. Disproving TENS threatens the auto-idolatry game.

Tl,dr. Buy both of them.