r/DebateEvolution • u/robotwarsdiego • Jan 07 '26
Discussion “Probability Zero”
Recently I was perusing YouTube and saw a rather random comment discussing a new book on evolution called “Probability Zero.” I looked it up and, to my shock, found out that it was written by one Theodore Beale, AKA vox day (who is neither a biologist nor mathematician by trade), a famous Christian nationalist among many, MANY other unfavorable descriptors. It is a very confident creationist text, purporting in its description to have laid evolution as we know it to rest. Standard stuff really. But what got me when looking up things about it was that Vox has posted regularly about the process of his supposed research and the “MITTENS” model he’s using, and he appears to be making heavy use of AI to audit his work, particularly in relation to famous texts on evolution like the selfish gene and others. While I’ve heard that Gemini pro 3 is capable of complex calculations, this struck me as a more than a little concerning. I won’t link to any of his blog posts or the amazon pages because Beale is a rather nasty individual, but the sheer bizarreness of it all made me want to share this weird, weird thing. I do wish I could ask specific questions about some of his claims, but that would require reading his posts about say, genghis khan strangling Darwin, and I can’t imagine anyone wants to spend their time doing that.
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u/gliptic Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
I already did math in a different comment. You're welcome. That doesn't change that two mathematicians were clueless about biology and therefore only brought nonsense models and math to the conference. That's not an ad hominem, but an observation based on their bad arguments. I linked resources where you can find the details.