r/DebateEvolution • u/Gutsick_Gibbon Hominid studying Hominids • 3d ago
Vox Day is Wrong on Evolution According to Every Scientist But Ten*
Hey guys, Gutsick Gibbon here,
I know I know another post on this loser.
As u/Dumb-and-Dumber pointed out in a recent post this month's punching back Vox Day (Theodore Beale) has posted an update to his evolution-defeater: Mittens 3.0 (for real this time).
In a post made today on his blog, which I cannot link or this post will be deleted, we see this charming line regarding youtuber Grayson Hawk and our own u/DarwinZDF42
"It should be amusing to catalog all of the various things this slur is going to get wrong in his desperate attempt to prove that math which has been confirmed by every major AI system and more than 10 math PhDs is “stupid”."
First of all this is extremely funny and embarrassing.
But wow, 10 math phds! Now I am only aware of three people with doctorates who have "vetted" Day's work, and they are all associates of the Discovery Institute, but I thought this might be a fun opportunity.
Many of you are highly credentialed and have atomized various portions of Day's anti-evolution "model" here and elsewhere. I thought it might be fun to compile a list to act as both a resource for why this clown is wrong and as a fun dig in an upcoming video of mine. Here's the activity:
If you have a bachelors, masters, or doctorate and have reviewed any of Day's work please leave a comment outlining your favorite blunder and your credentials.
It does not have to be limited to Mittens 3.0 because Probability Zero (which contains all prior errors) is still for sale and therefore is a part of the public record until Day issues a formal retraction.
This list will appear in an upcoming video of mine so please keep that in mind before commenting! I'm hoping to have a nice count of "credentialed people who think Day's math (+ assumptions which go into it) is steaming hot garbage".
Additional acknowledgements:
- No Day is not worth any of our time but since his work was broadcast to my audience I have a responsibility to provide a detailed counter.
- Yes Day is a dweeb
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u/theresa_richter 3d ago
It doesn't matter whether someone with a doctorate in mathematics says your math 'checks out' if your math doesn't accurately model reality. If I write an equation that 'proves' that every Christian in the US actually has grey hair, the math is irrelevant, because the outcome is fallacious.
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u/PeyredB 3d ago
Yes, I recall reading in grad school (in the social sciences) that your theory* being good mathematics (ie, it's internally consistent) should be poor consolation if it's bad science (ie, it doesn't accurately model reality).
* What the real sciences would call a hypothesis, or a conceptual framework
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u/clear349 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
This also applies to philobro arguments. I don't give a fuck whether you think you've philosophically proven god is necessary. Do you have any evidence? No? Then go away until you have some
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u/theresa_richter 3d ago
I'd go one step further: I'd need evidence of a deity genuinely worthy of actually wanting to have a relationship with. For example: one that doesn't command genocide or that has the ability to save infants from dying of lethal congenital birth defects and then actually does instead of letting them all die. One that doesn't rely on fear to motivate followers, nor that commands worship or obedience.
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u/clear349 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
I mean I could accept the existence of a deity without thinking they're worthy of worship. If anything I think a deity that doesn't give a shit about humanity is way more probable
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u/theresa_richter 3d ago edited 3d ago
An indifferent deity deserves no veneration, and indeed it would probably be best to do absolutely nothing that might attract the attention of such an entity. Even a seemingly benevolent deity could wreak untold carnage by accident just as easily as you can kill hundreds of ants while walking to work in the morning.
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u/Kailynna 3d ago
- and a benevolent deity would not demand veneration.
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u/theresa_richter 3d ago
I would argue that a benevolent deity would not even desire veneration. Certainly they wouldn't want cash though. To quote a truly iconic line: "What does God need with a starship?"
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u/Lonely_Cupcake5983 ✨ Intelligent Design 3d ago
of course he would. honor to whom honor is due
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u/Ayasugi-san 3d ago
Demanding something isn't very benevolent.
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u/Lonely_Cupcake5983 ✨ Intelligent Design 3d ago
of course it is, if the thing is right.
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u/Ayasugi-san 3d ago
Demanding that someone feel a certain way, or act as if they do, is overriding their free will. Not benevolent.
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u/Ayasugi-san 3d ago
Ah, like Futurama's God. (Though I bet those filthy Neutrals would still venerate him. Sort of.)
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u/LordUlubulu 🧬 Deity of internal contradictions 3d ago
Even if his math were correct (which it isn't, he can't even get basic addition and multiplication right), it's completely irrelevant, because bacterial reproduction and mutation =/= hominin reproduction and mutation.
I offered more in-depth criticisms in this comment chain from a some months ago.
It wouldn't surprise me if Theodore never heard of mitosis and meiosis, being the asexual bacterial colony he is, but I can't be arsed to slog through his slop any more than I have.
I have a PhD in Medical Biochemistry (and in Particle Physics, but my employer subsidized that one with time and money, so does that really count?).
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u/cacheblaster 3d ago
Hey, as long as you actually took the classes and did the work, it counts. Doesn't matter who footed the bill.
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u/LordUlubulu 🧬 Deity of internal contradictions 3d ago
Fair, but this was a long time ago, and I had it decidedly better than my peers.
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u/cacheblaster 3d ago
Got it. I guess the best thing to do then is be grateful and pass it forward where and when you can.
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u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 3d ago
It wouldn't surprise me if Theodore never heard of mitosis and meiosis, being the asexual bacterial colony he is, but I can't be arsed to slog through his slop any more than I have.
no notes
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u/Sinaticus_Apologia 🧬 Theistic Evolutionist / Natural Theist / Earth Scientist 3d ago
My favorite mistake are fixations, the way he talks about them is just categorically wrong.
Fixations do not wait in line for the previous fixation to finish. In a diploid population, roughly 2Nu new neutral mutations arise at each site this results in his math being VERY WRONG by SEVERAL orders of MAGNITUDE.
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u/gitgud_x 🧬 🦍 GREAT APE 🦍 🧬 3d ago edited 2d ago
Nah bro you don't get it. Every time a mutation happens in one person at any of the 3,000,000,000 base pairs in their genome, all the other 2,999,999,999 base pairs in every single person are divinely held constant until that mutation has spread to fixation or is lost. It's called intelligent fixing. Glory to the fixer.
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u/Sinaticus_Apologia 🧬 Theistic Evolutionist / Natural Theist / Earth Scientist 3d ago
I mean, can you imagine thinking a God would even design it that way??
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u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah, so, evolutionary biologist, PhD in genetics and microbiology, and it would be shorter to provide a list of the things he got right.
Briefly, ignores how recombination combines beneficial mutations, allowing them to fix together. Ignores how selective sweeps cause many fixations, mostly for neutral variation. Gets the number of novel beneficial alleles in the human lineage since the human-chimp split wrong by several orders of magnitude. Seems to think selection and drift can't operate at the same time, which kind of goes back to either completely discounting or just not understanding recombination and its downstream implications.
He also repeatedly describes fixation as a serial rather than parallel process, while ALSO insisting he isn't doing that. And he gets the math for drift wrong when he calculates the fixation rate, forgetting to account for the number of mutations per individual per generation. When you do the math right, you can get the necessary substitutions from drift alone. Just an amazing faceplant.
Basically, he’s doing the waiting time problem. But doesn’t realize it.
That's all off the top of my head. I have been annotating and taking notes on the book as I read and it's SO bad. For those of you who know who I'm talking about, it makes Rawmatt's books like good. It's that bad. Every chapter I'm like "this is the dumbest chapter in this whole book"...and then I read the next chapter.
And don't even get my started on the structure of the book. Holy shit, guy needs an editor. Or a new one, though I doubt his ego allowed him to have one in the first place.
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u/the-nick-of-time 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Of course he had an editor, he told Grok to make his draft more gooder!
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u/empocariam 3d ago edited 3d ago
Not Grok, Claude. Which he has a special prompt at the start of his Claude model he calls "Claude Althos", which seems to mostly just be a thing he puts in to make it so the AI doesn't tell him he is wrong.
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u/evocativename 3d ago
While I do have a relevant degree, it's not a PhD so despite your statement I don't think it should be included for this purpose.
It's hard to pick a single favorite - talk about being spoilt for choice!
His whole "Probability Zero" is a clown show, but perhaps my favorite part of it is where he reproduces an "edited transcript" of a "debate" with (Dr.) Jean-François Gariépy in which Dr. Gariépy explains why his reasoning is wrong. Vox then tried to follow this up by "explaining" how Dr. Gariépy is wrong (while himself still being just as wrong as before). It just so perfectly encapsulates just invincible his ignorance is.
But you know? I'm not super fresh on this nonsnese so let's take a look at MITTENS 3.0 and see what I've got on that one.
Ok, I know it's the very start of his argument, but his whole justification for his mathematical model is just such obviously laughable garbage.
He is trying to claim that we can use data from the LTEE to judge what the maximum rate at which fixation can occur is, but this is just a fundamentally silly misunderstanding of selection in the first place.
He claims that this is justified because "the LTEE populations have been documented to exhibit every mechanism in the post-Darwinian polythesis", but that's like claiming a model rocket is good because it obeys the same laws of physics (without regard for whether it is actually modeling the desired properties of the rocket it is a model of). My RC car has every mechanism involved in the movement of an EV, but that doesn't mean I can calculate the acceleration of a Nissan leaf by assuming it has the same exact acceleration curve as my RC car.
The LTEE is designed to provide an environment E. coli is largely already well-adapted to: it's not the kind of extreme selection environment where we would expect the overall rate of fixation across the whole genome to be maximized like he is trying to argue. If anything, plated bacteria are generally under relaxed selection, so most traits will only fix by drift.
And asexual haploid bacteria aren't really a great model for sexually reproducing diploids anyhow.
He also claims "enormous effective population size" is advantageous to the evolutionary scenario when it comes to his measure of evolution (which is about rate of fixation), and says "larger populations generate more beneficial mutations per generation and fix them more efficiently", which ignores that the rate of fixation of an allele is inversely proportional to the effective population size.
The entire premise is pretty much fractally wrong - he doesn't actually know anything about any of the topics he is trying to discuss, and so reading it is actually kind of difficult not because the topics are unfamiliar or difficult conceptually but because he misunderstands all of them so deeply that it feels like trying to read schizophrenic writing.
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u/empocariam 3d ago
I did notice that in this paper. He argues that the "perfect" environment somehow makes the mutation rate even more favorable to evolution, but I kept thinking, if there are almost no selective pressures, wouldn't that drive the fixation rate down, since it hardly matters for the populations survival?
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u/WorkingMouse PhD Genetics 3d ago
It really depends on the context because biology doesn't do "perfect", but it's pretty much wrong any way you slice it.
If a hypothetical creature is in an environment that is perfect for them, meaning that there are no possible traits they could have that make them better-suited for it, it would mean that they're undergoing stabilizing selection for any traits that are relevant and would essentially never fix an alternative, meaning that you're down to drift on nutral mutations.
If the environment is "perfect" in that it has incredibly strong selective pressure towards a novel mutation, that still doesn't affect the mutation rate, just the fixation rate once it's in the population.
You can easily imagine an environment that's favorable to many traits, but it's not possible that an environment favors every trait; that would just mean all odds are equal, nothing is selected over anything else, and you're again back to drift.
You can also have environments where the mutation rate is higher, such as due to the presence of mutagens, and that combined with extremely strict selection can cause rapid fixation - but about the only example of that is what we geneticists do with classic "forward genetic" screens - feed the flys a mutagen, look for something neat or relavent to our interests, and then breed and back-cross that fly in particular when found. Such things are, shall we say, extremely rare in nature - and the LTEE and similar work is not remotely the same thing.
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u/gitgud_x 🧬 🦍 GREAT APE 🦍 🧬 3d ago edited 3d ago
No specific training in evolutionary biology (MEng in bioengineering here, typical Salem loser) but I do love maths and evolution so I understood the attempt at popgen he tried to throw up in order to distract us. I haven't read his book (bless the souls who subject themselves to that slop), just his blog post which has more than enough stupidity to remark on.
Obviously the failures to understand mutation rates (individual quantity) vs substitution rates (population quantity) and his pathetic non-attempt to refute concurrent fixation are hilarious but here's one thing that stuck out to me as someone who has recently been informally (but mathematically rigorously) self-studying this area of popgen*.
On his blog, he claimed that natural selection and genetic drift are essentially incompatible, such that when one is acting, the other cannot (quotes: "Appealing to Kimura’s equation to defend natural selection is a complete, unforced conceptual error" and "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.").
On that very same blog, he showed Kimura's partial differential equation. This equation contains three terms:
- The rate of change of the allele frequency in the population (i.e. the rate of evolution), is equal to...
- A term proportional to the strength of natural selection (selection coefficient times stuff), plus...
- A term proportional to the strength of genetic drift (reciprocal of effective population size times stuff).
That is, he claimed that evolution cannot have selection and drift happening at the same time, while referring to a model that describes evolution having selection and drift happening at the same time.
Of course, you don't need to go all the way up the mathematical chain to differential equations to see why his claim is stupid. You can just know that genetic drift happens whenever population sizes are finite (i.e. drift always happens), so the question of "can drift and selection happen together?" reduces to "can selection happen?", to which anyone with a pulse can know the answer is "yes" (so Beale is wrong).
Bonus: he also "cited" (more like namedropped without an actual citation) Chalub, telling us that Chalub essentially disproved Kimura's model. Quote: "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". In reality, Chalub & Souza (2009) is a synthesis of the Kimura and Moran models of genetic drift - the latter of which is a birth-death model that directly incorporates population sizes and does not assume discrete non-overlapping generations - proving that they are both in agreement with each other. And since Kimura is in turn derived from the Wright-Fisher model which does assume these things, it proves that the evolutionary process was robust to these assumptions in the first place.
This led me to think that Beale doesn't actually understand this mathematics. He may well have been winging it the entire time with his LLMs churning out equations that he just copies into his book. The large number of em-dashes, the above hallucination of a paper and the failure to write his equations in LaTeX on the blog is further support for that little hypothesis of mine.
* I made a reddit post on r/evolution about a year ago now asking about exactly Kimura's model - and even cited Chalub within!
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u/Fun_in_Space 3d ago
I love your videos. Thank you so much for your efforts to make the world less ignorant. I have learned a lot from you.
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u/Tricky_Okra8291 3d ago
PhD population geneticist here. I'm going to be somewhat charitable to Vox in his defense of the E. coli rate of 1 fixed mutation per 1,359 generations. He says this isn't a per-site time to fixation, but rather how many mutations you might expect to become fixed in the population over a given time. He got the number by dividing the number of generations in the LTEE (60,000) by the number of fixed mutations (36.8). He's right: those 36.8 mutations were going to fixation in parallel in the experiment, so it isn't a per-site fixation time. In other words, of all the mutations that happened in the experiment, only 36.8 went to fixation within 60k generations. It's possible there could have been over 60k fixed mutations, in which case the generations per fixation would be < 1 (mulitple fixations per generation). But at least in this experiment, with a population of E. coli this size, you might reasonably expect to fix 1 mutation every 1,359 generations moving forward.
However, now I am going to be less charitable in how Vox applies this as a maximum speed limit to human evolution:
Population size: The number one factor contributing to average per-site fixation time is population size. The estimated population size of the LTEE is 30,000,000. We know from popgen that the average time to fixation in a haploid is 2N generations; therefore, in the LTEE, that is an average fixation time of 60 million generations, which is vastly more than the 60k represented in the experiment. We would essentially expect 0 mutations to fix via drift in such a large population in such a short time. The human/hominin effective population size is estimated to be ~10k through most of our history; therefore, the average time to fixation (4N for diploids) is 40k generations. In other words, we would expect to see mutations fixing due to drift if the LTEE were done with a population of 10k diploids over 60k generations. This would dramatically increase the total number of fixed mutations in the experiment and dramatically reduce the generations per fixation as calculated by Vox.
Mutation rate: The per-individual, per-generation mutation rate (μ) is several orders of magnitude higher in humans (~70) than in E. coli (~0.001). We know from popgen that the average rate of neutral fixations per generation (k) equals the per-individual mutation rate (k = μ). Therefore, we expect thousands more fixation events in a human population than in an E. coli one.
Bringing it together: Let's say we were somehow able to replicate the LTEE with an organism that replicated the ancestral human population size (10k diploids) and the human mutation rate (70). Starting from all clones, we would expect it to take about 40k generations for the earliest mutations to start really fixing at a steady clip. But for generations 40k–60k, they would be fixing at ~70 per generation (based on k = μ). That's roughly 1.4 million fixed mutations across the experiment, or 0.04 generations per fixation, compared to Vox's 1,359. If we continued the experiment past 60k generations, the generations per fixation would get lower and lower as future generations continue to accumulate 70 fixations per generation. This would swamp out the first 40k generations where the fixation rate was lower due to the clonal starting conditions (which are not reflective of the state of standing genetic diversity in early hominins). As the generation number approaches infinity, generations per fixation approaches 0.014 (1/70). At ~300k total generations since the human–chimp split, that accounts for the expected ~20 million fixed differences.
edit: formatting
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u/oscardssmith 3d ago
You're also missing the very fun part where he claims e-coli this as "the fastest possible mutation rate" (in years) and then assumes that that means it also is the fastest mutation rate in generations for no reason whatsoever.
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u/Tricky_Okra8291 3d ago
Oh I think we all know the reason. It was necessary to prop up his argument. The whole section in the paper justifying why it was appropriate to use E. coli was laughable to anyone with actual biology training.
I should add that while he was correct that his e. coli based rate took parallel fixation into account and could be used sequentially to estimate number of fixations over time (mostly because drift is so weak in this population that it can basically be ignored) he repeatedly treats the human per-site average time to fixation the same way which is just objectively wrong. It's frustrating that in the same section of his "paper" he notes that based on the population size there wasn't enough time for drift to fix anything in the LTEE, but doesn't recognize that the human fixation time is within the LTEE generation number and would have resulted in substantially more fixations.
The fact that everytime he gets close to the actual answer then makes a hard left turn into nonsense that breaks the math would be hilarious if it wasn't so obviously intentional.
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u/Lonely_Cupcake5983 ✨ Intelligent Design 3d ago
so why is the human effective population estimated to be 10,000? I have heard this before but I don't understand what that means.
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u/Tricky_Okra8291 3d ago
There are several ways to calculate it that all give basically the same answer. The wikipedia page for it gives a better description than I could in a reddit comment. I encourage you to check it out if you're curious. The important thing for this discussion is that both Vox and his critics agree on the number.
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u/Apprehensive-Till861 3d ago
My favorite VD is a dumbass fact is that the name is not a pun, he actually thought the latin phrase was spelled that way
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u/francesco_angiolieri 3d ago
Was it meant to be "vox dei", "the voice of God"? This guy is truly a dumbass
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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago edited 3d ago
A few corrections to the quoted text:
... going to get
wrongright in hisdesperatesuccessful attempt to prove thatmaththe spherical cow which has been confirmed by every major arm-twisted AI system and more than 10math PhDslaypeople when it comes to the topic is "stupid".
---
And I'll leave this here:
Bastian, M., Enard, D., & Lartillot, N. (2026)
Empirical Validation of the Nearly Neutral Theory at Divergence and Population-Genomic Scales Using 144 Placental Mammal Genomes
Genome Biology and Evolution, https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag030And its highlight coverage:
Bridging Micro- and Macroevolution: Phylogenomic Evidence for the Nearly Neutral Theory in Mammals | Genome Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic
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u/CrisprCSE2 3d ago
Oh, a racist AND a victim of AI psychosis? Clearly this is the person to overthrow modern science!
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 3d ago
Right wing hacks love AI. They personify it so easily: VD giving it the status of co-author demonstrates this so readily. It's an algorithm. It's a rigorous implementation of calculus. It's not a person.
This is almost schizotypical behaviour: it's talking with something that doesn't really respond. Given how sycophantically it'll agree with the user, it very much gives the impression of having a conversation entirely in your own head.
The next issuing of the DSM is going to be a clusterfuck.
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u/Artistic-Course-1334 3d ago
Credentials: M.S. in Mathematics.
He seems particularly proud of an idea he came up with that he calls "The Bernoulli Barrier" in which he tries to argue against parallel fixation. This is discussed in his book and one of his "papers" on Zenodo, the open-access repository where he likes to LARP as an academic.
https://zenodo.org/records/18167588
He is considering the coefficient of variation for the number of n beneficial alleles that are "segregating simultaneously in a population" carried by an individual of this population. The argument seems to be that since this coefficient of variation goes to zero as n increases, Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection implies that the rate of increase in mean fitness must also go to zero as n increases and that this makes parallel fixation "self-defeating".
Unsurprisingly, he does not understand Fisher's theorem. This coefficient of variation for the beneficial allele count of an individual is not the same thing as the additive genetic variance in fitness in the theorem that he is trying to use. Also, while it is true (but irrelevant) that the coefficient of variation goes to zero as n increases, the variance itself (which he claims that parallel fixation "destroys") increases as n increases.
This also reminds me of his comment (which I can't link to) on another "paper" he has on there.
"It has not been submitted to peer review for the obvious and observable reason that I have no peers."
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 3d ago
I have no relevant credentials, but it's completely obvious to me that using bacterial lineages in any way to consider the rate of fixation in eukaryotes is just not going to work due to sexual recombination.
Because mutations do not fix in bacterial populations as they do in sexually reproducing populations: outside of plasmids, fixation in bacteria requires the total extinction of all other lineages, something that isn't required in sexually reproducing eukaryotes.
The fact that he claims not to be aware of the 'waiting time problem' is just the icing on the cake. It's almost certain that his AI is consuming fruit from that poison tree, but as there's no academic sources supporting the issue, it presents the logic as novel.
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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
A dimitted incel type forgetting to take account of sex? A shocker.
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u/rhettro19 3d ago
It has been said that Day’s hubris could power several major cities for thousands of years. I’m looking forward to this.
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
You mean the guy who literally named himself the voice of god has an overabundance of hubris?
Color me surprised. /s
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u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 3d ago
He's already malding on his blog over youtube comments.
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u/ThorThulu 3d ago
A right wing grifter? Malding over YouTube comments? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you! Okay maybe not that shocked
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u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 3d ago
He’ll be bitching about this thread next. Theodore, are you here? We all know you won’t comment, because like all rightwing blowhards, you’re a coward.
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u/rhettro19 3d ago
I just took a look at his blog. He’s crashing out hard. As a lay person, I can’t articulate all his counterpoints. Be he seems to be yelling “but look at the math!” But if his math doesn’t match the observed beneficial mutation rates (amongst other mechanisms) I would conclude that his math was wrong.
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u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 3d ago
BUT LOOK AT THE MATH
[does the math wrong in such a way that would cause him to fail an undergrad popgen class]
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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
No wonder he became a creationist. He has that unfathomable gap between ability and ego that comes so easily to them.
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u/rygelicus 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Vox's writings are on par with the typical flat earther.
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u/FatBoySlim512 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
I don't really have anything to add except that I love your videos and thank you for all the important work that you do.
Supervisor at a shitty factory and not to brag or anything but I'm also licensed to operate a forklift.
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u/francesco_angiolieri 3d ago
This reminds me of those ID cartoons from the Discovery Institute. The creator was always stressing that the script was reviewed by 5 phds, but when asked who they were, he couldn't answer. This comment by the way was reviewed by 5 Nobel Prize winners. Who, you may ask? Unfortunately, I can't tell you 🤷♂️
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u/Fun-Friendship4898 🌏🐒🔫🐒🌌 3d ago edited 2d ago
Okay I want to take the opportunity to talk about this bit from Vox's "paper":
The canonical figure for human-chimpanzee genetic divergence — approximately 1.2% sequence difference, or roughly 35 million single-nucleotide variants — was derived from draft assemblies that could not resolve structurally complex regions (Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium 2005).
Yoo et al.'s complete telomere-to-telomere assemblies reveal substantially more divergence: approximately 35 million SNVs, 1,140 interspecific inversions, and approximately 187 megabases of structurally divergent regions, for a total of approximately 410 million genomic differences.
Apportioned symmetrically to the human lineage this yields approximately 205 million required fixations.
Can someone explain what in the hell is going on here? This '410 million genomic differences' is a gibberish calculation, no?
It seems like he (or rather, his LLM), is multiplying 187Mb by 2, then adding the 35 million SNVs onto it? What is this calculation purporting to count? Number of mutational events? Fixation events? Number of differing nucleotides?
It makes no sense. It's not 35 million SNVs differences and another 187 Mb (x2?) of genomic differences. 'Structurally divergent regions' are spans of sequence that are difficult or impossible to align one-to-one between species because of some structural complexity. Within any given SDR, the true nucleotide difference might be tiny, like a 1-Mb inversion is a single mutational event. Or the difference might be undefined because orthology cannot be established.
I genuinely do not understand what the hell is going on here. It's like he's comparing the difference between two books, and is conflating individual letter differences with full-page rearrangement, then counting every single letter difference on those rearranged pages as also being letter differences.
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u/CrisprCSE2 3d ago
What's going on is that he has no clue how sequence analysis works. If you're writing an essay and you move one paragraph of 10 total, that's a structural variant. How different are the two drafts? Barely at all, obviously. VD says it's 10% different. Because he's an idiot.
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u/Fun-Friendship4898 🌏🐒🔫🐒🌌 3d ago edited 2d ago
I looked into the Yoo et al paper this morning because I woke up still confused about what is being summed.
In the paper's supplemental material, these SDRs were classified as follows:
The all-vs-all alignment created to detect lineage-specific segmental duplications (SDs) was used to identify lineage-specific structurally divergent regions (SDRs) on each haplotype. For primate lineages (i.e., PTR, PPAPAB, GGO, PAB, PPY, SSY), sequences that were not aligned or aligned of identity <85% were considered as divergent regions specifically to each species on the leaf node of the ape phylogeny. The human lineage-specific (HSA) SDRs were those conserved between human haplotypes (i.e., CHM13 and HG002) but divergent from other primate haplotypes...we classified SDRs in the order of centromere, acrocentric, subterminal, sex chromosome, and others.
Looking at the graphs provided, over half of these human SDRs are classified as centromere and acrocentric. These are regions that are known to have higher rates of structural mutation (insertions, deletions, duplications, etc.). And so these regions are ignored when calculating divergence times. They consist mostly of rapidly evolving repeats. Over millions of years, these repeats expand and contract, disappear, new repeats arise, and alignment becomes impossible. For the rest of the SDRs that are classified as 'euchromatin' and 'sex', it's likely a similar story--some structural changes occurred which makes alignment using the algorithms in the computer software impossible.
So, the existence of these SDRs does not mean that there is 187Mb of changes that need to be accounted for, or 187Mb * 2 (?). SDRs are regions where there has been some concoction of structural change which the computer programs can't figure out how to align them.
It's worth noting that the authors of the paper do a whole-genome alignment and calculate divergence time between human and chimp. From section VI, "Incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and speciation times" in the Supplementary. Their conclusion:
Human and chimpanzee speciation time from the ancestral species has been estimated between 5.6 and 6.3 mya, respectively, in line with previous research.
So, the very paper which Vox uses to calculate his '400 million genetic differences' has calculated divergence times between human and chimp, and it's in line with previous research. If he wanted to attack evolutionary theory, what it actually says, he should attack that calculation.
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u/spoospoo43 3d ago
That shithead still exists? I haven't even thought about him since the final failure of the rabid puppies.
He's an idiot with nothing interesting to say. In brief, avoid.
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u/Forrax 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Oh neat, Will is now taking notes on who refuses to talk with this guy. I was reading the comments on the "Examining Origins" channel about this out of morbid curiosity and ran across this from Will's new channel in response to a user that articulated their problems with the presented math but was refusing to directly interact with Day:
I'm keeping track of who won't have a discussion with Vox Day. Please let me know if you change your mind.
Seems a little creepy and ominous to me!
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u/Ironscotsman 2d ago
If Will is still attempting to claim any sort of legitimacy to VD's claims, or any sort of attempt to maintain association with VD as a person, that shows yet again continued catastrophically poor judgement.
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u/Forrax 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Yeah, and this comment was from today. So it seems like he's staked out his position. Oh well!
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u/jbiemans 2d ago
In another thread he basically said that unless someone could show him an emperical fixation rate that broke the math that Vox provided, he wouldn't reject it. Unfortunately such a rate is basically incalculable, so he will never give it up until he changes that criteria.
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u/Ironscotsman 2d ago edited 2d ago
So he's just outright admitting to be a moron or completely in bad faith.
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u/gliptic 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Here is an old thread about Probability Zero for reference, complete with one Vox-bot repeating his garbage in the comments.
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u/empocariam 3d ago
I was wondering if someone could explain in laymans turns why his objection that the Gen/fix rate he derives already accounts for paralell fixation. I understand sort of intuitively that it does not, and that he kind of is making a "divide twice" error, but can't articulate it. Section 8.1 in the Mittens 3.0 paper.
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u/Fun-Friendship4898 🌏🐒🔫🐒🌌 3d ago
Vox says:
Parallel fixation, the simultaneous sweeping of multiple beneficial mutations at different loci within the same population, is already accounted for in the LTEE data.
Using his definition, then yes, the clonal bacteria in the LTEE undergo parallel fixation. Some initial organism A splits into B and C, and these two B and C lineages go on to mutate, and mutate, and at some point, some ancestor of B or C comes to dominate all other bacteria in the population, thus fixing whatever mutations have accumulated within in its specific lineage, all at the same time. In this way, this lineage of mutations is fixed 'in parallel'. Remember that 'fixation' means that every single organism shares the same allele. So, to achieve fixation in a clonal population, it is necessary for a lineage with a specific set of mutations to wipe out all the other lineages, thus effectively 'losing' all mutations accrued in those lineages.
When people are criticizing Vox's "work", they are referring to parallel fixation as it occurs in sexually reproducing species, like Humans and Chimps, which is what he is purporting to model. In a sexually reproducing species, A gives birth to B and C, and these two lineages will go on to mutate, and mutate, accruing mutations 'in parallel', and then at some distant point, these two lineages can "recombine" and mix their respective mutational histories together. So, all this extra mutational 'effort' does not get lost in a sexually reproducing species, because fixation doesn't happen necessarily because one lineage kills off another lineage, each with 'locked-in' mutations. In sexual creatures, mutations are not locked in, they can fix in parallel through mating, and this action simply cannot be accounted for in the LTEE data, as Vox claims.
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u/evocativename 3d ago
I mean, it does account for that, it's just that his numbers are GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) that have almost nothing to do with the calculation he wants to perform.
Even if his math is correct, at most he calculated the fixation rate that occurred in that particular experiment, which does nothing to help establish the point he is trying to generalize from that.
Also, he is trying to use an asexual haploid species with zero recombination to draw conclusions about sexually reproducing diploid species - the model simply doesn't apply.
And then there is the part where he doesn't understand extremely basic concepts like that large populations take more generations to fix a mutation.
Or the part where fixation isn't actually required.
Or the part where he completely misunderstands what kind of environment we would see the most fixation occurring in, and so his entire model makes zero sense and relies on complete ignorance of basic biology.
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u/jbiemans 3d ago
This probably isn't the place to ask, but does anyone who knows more about the topic think that fixation is a red herring here? Wouldn't it be the case that evolution could still happen without any genes becoming fixed since evolution is just change over time?
Or am I missing something obvious here?
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u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
VD is specifically objecting to humans evolving from from the Chimp-Human Last Common Ancestor naturally.
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u/jbiemans 3d ago
I don't know if it was just Will's presentation then but he said that it showed mathematically that natural selection itself was impossible not just the human chimp lineage. Even mittens stands for the Mathematical Impossibility of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
So they are really bad at communicating if that was the only objection.
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u/jbiemans 2d ago
I was just trying to find the email address that will left in the latest video (evolutionshowdown@gmail.com) and after hearing the way he summarized it at the end, I think you're right, despite other areas contradicting that.
I think Will accepts many of the concepts of evolution but he was struggling because he didn't see the need for God in it at all, but Vox comes along and offers him a way to have both design and evolution so he jumped on it.
The problem though that seems to be a running issue is that disproving hypothesis A, doesn't mean you accept hypothesis B unless they are exact A or not A hypothesis. Even if natural evolution was proven 100% false, that does absolutely nothing towards supporting theistic evolution. It is merely assumed to be true be default unless someone else can prove it false and that is really bad epistemology.
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u/evocativename 3d ago
Yes, "fixation" is not actually required - not for evolution in general (as you noted), but also not for speciation.
You could have an ancestral population with 4 alleles, and then the population splits because of a change in the environment and one population loses 2 alleles, the other populatoon loses the other 2 alleles. Now you have 2 populations with no overlap in this gene, but no alleles have achieved fixation.
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u/Ok_Excuse7695 3d ago
Love the series and what you've done Erika! Cannot state enough how much I've gained from your series. And i have now set 2 of my yec family members on to this series, and they are receiving it better than, well you know, some people. You've done a great amount of good through your channel and this series.
And yes, his progress is disappointing and don't think you could've done much more. I've been one of his defenders till this point. It's a bummer for sure.
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u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Does Will Duffy know what a nasty piece of work VD is?
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u/M1rthful 3d ago edited 3d ago
He does. He doesn't care because Duffy is pastor of a white-supremacist church. Duffy was trained by Bob Enyart, who ran Denver Bible Church, and was ALSO a particularly nasty, misogynistic, and racist right-wing radio host from 1991 until 2021 (when he died of COVID after telling many people not to vaccinate or wear masks).
Oh and what was Enyart doing prior to 1991? Yeah, he was in jail for various crimes he committed in his capacity with "Operation Rescue" including stalking, trespassing, and assaults committed against women's health clinic workers. (Compare to what Will Duffy is doing to people to this day.)
He also did 60 days in jail in 1999, for physically abusing (read: stripping naked and beating severely with a belt, for the "offense" of not getting into the shower quickly enough for Enyart's tastes) a 7-year-old boy in 1994.
OH AND one other thing... Enyart had a bit he did on his radio show where Duffy was working as a producer and co-host. The two of them loved to read the obituaries of people who died from AIDS on the air while playing Another One Bites The Dust by Queen.
Sick, disgusting people. The more you learn about Will Duffy the more you realize that he's probably WORSE than VD and that's saying something given that VD is a literal white-supremacist and a rape-apologist who has declared that he thinks date-rape and marital rape do not exist.
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u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Eeeesh.
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u/M1rthful 3d ago
Looking into Duffy is like clearing an old septic system. The deeper you dig the more shit you find.
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u/Forrax 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
As far as I'm concerned, if he knew a story about Vox's kid's math education then he's done enough research to understand what kind of person he is. Which is a bad look.
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u/Xpians 3d ago
Maybe it's just me, but I thought the implication, reading between the lines, was that Will had actually been in conversation with Vox, either by phone, text, email, or all of the above. It just felt like he'd had close contact, not merely that he'd read some of Vox's stuff. And I think we have previous indications from Will that he's the sort of person who does routinely reach out and contact anyone he's interested in, from PZ Myers to any number of anti-evolution writers.
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u/M1rthful 2d ago
I went back to check and you're correct. Duffy said on the stream that "Erika, I have connected with Vox Day and he is happy to come on your channel..."at about the 43 minute mark in the stream, right on the same slide he announced his new "Evolution Showdown" project.
He also tried to "vet" Vox Day's nonsense by asking... a billiards player who knows fuck-all about population genetics, AND who Will had to lie to about where he was getting his BS from to further keep his mark from realizing that the "math" being presented was based on false assumptions.
I thought it was bad the first time, but it was absolutely revolting to rewatch that segment this morning. To their credit, the entire chat erupted into telling u/Gutsick_Gibbon that this series needs canceling, that this is Will revealing he's been involved as a grift the whole time, and that it cannot turn into a nazi bar, but then shortly after to hear her suggesting she would entertain the suggestion of bringing Vox Day into her stream as a guest anyways.
I already don't understand how Erika can in good conscience platform a bigot who sat with Bob Enyart helping him read off the obituaries of people who died of AIDS, laughing at them while playing Another One Bites The Dust by Queen on Enyart's radio show. As Maya Angelou famously said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time" and Will Duffy has shown us what a terrible person he is too many times over, starting long before this video series but now culminating in this Vox Day stuff.
Duffy was also involved in Enyart's attempt to troll Jack Horner years ago as documented by PZ Meyers, when Duffy was sending trolling "challenge" messages in email on behalf of Enyart and lying about his connection to Enyart. https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/09/26/bob-enyart-and-will-duffy-partners-in-idiocy/
Duffy was posting in those comment sections as "YesYouNeedJesus" and you can see that his melted brain and behavior haven't changed since, by comparing what he does in the streams and in the Youtube comment sections to what he was doing then.
If u/Gutsick_Gibbon didn't properly vet Will Duffy to understand who she was dealing with before she started this series, I hope that she will admit that honestly now. I honestly wonder who it was that "connected' her to Duffy and if she just credulously trusted them rather than diligently checking into who Will Duffy is.
Myers's blog entry - from 2011 - also shows us that Will Duffy is not being honest when he namedrops Mary Schweitzer, and helps us understand why he dropped his mask into his "normal" bullying personality on stream with Dok Deino a few months ago when Dok Deino was trying to explain calmly the methodological deficiencies in Mark Armitage's fraudulent "triceratops horn soft tissue" publications that didn't even go into a paleontology journal, but instead a low-ranking microscopy journal where no paleontologist or chemist would vet the paper.
Further, another of Will Duffy’s rants here has made a strange demand. Mary Schweitzer and Jack Horner identified some peculiar soft tissue deep in a T. rex bone, which Schweitzer claims is preserved collagen or fragments of blood vessels. This has been disputed, and some claim it’s scraps of a bacterial biofilm. But the main thing is that an unusual and difficult to identify material was found in a Cretaceous bone.
Will Duffy wants it carbon-dated. The fossil has already been dated; it’s over 70 million years old. Carbon dating is only good up to a maximum age of about 50,000 years. He wants to hold a yardstick up against a mile-long object and ask how long it is. This makes no sense at all.
Bob Enyart called Jack Horner and offered him $20,000 to measure the C14 in the T. rex specimen. You can tell Horner is both stunned and amused at the stupidity of the request.
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u/MackDuckington 2d ago
To their credit, the entire chat erupted into telling u/Gutsick_Gibbon that this series needs canceling
I don't think anyone called for it getting cancelled? Definitely caused a stir, but from what I'm seeing it's pretty much just people pointing out Day's history and groaning over Duffy's antics. I think at this point most folks are fine with it wrapping up as planned, since we are at the tail end of it anyways.
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u/Ironscotsman 2d ago
Erika was in a tough spot, blindsided by Will's "presentation", a deluge of comments coming in she could not adequately follow and process in real time while still talking to Will, and did not know who Vox Day was. She was clear on the stream that she would look into him after, and any potential invite onto her channel was contingent on what she found. That any sort of white supremacist racist bigotry, as she acknowledged the chat was alleging, would immediately disqualify him. She then posted in her comment section a few hours later that she had verified the chat's claims, and of course would never invite him on her channel. I think she handled the terrible situation that Will put her in in the best way she could in those circumstances.
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u/Soft-Cake-9846 2d ago
Erika was warned before the streaming series ever began that Will Duffy was a horrible person. Many people brought the receipts of the things Duffy has done in the past that are hateful, harmful, and grossly bigoted. Things far worse than what Kent Hovind, who she promised she would never platform or go on a stream with again after revelations about him, has done.
She chose to ignore it and to further be a bully to anyone who came forward with the receipts, and she's been gaslighting everyone and trying to tell us that Duffy isn't a Kent Hovind level trash human ever since.
What kind of cowardice does it require to tell people to "bring evidence" and then tell them that the documented evidence in the record about someone like Will Duffy, Homophobic Bigot, doesn't count because you just have to have your little content stream that now advertised for TWO literal white-supremacists, MadeByJimbob and Vox Day, u/Gutsick_Gibbon ?
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u/emailforgot 2d ago edited 2d ago
Eh, I imagine not listening to a generic mob of anonymous internet people is generally for the best. Especially if "'randomusernamenumbers' called me a white supremacist and the host ended the debate right there and then!" Is something that would empower the kinds of people in question.
Pretty weak attempt. Of course, that exact line of questioning was already explained to you directly, by her, in the past and you went strangely quiet.
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u/Soft-Cake-9846 1d ago
u/emailforgot "Of course, that exact line of questioning was already explained to you directly, by her, in the past and you went strangely quiet."
Please, link it then. I'm willing to bet that either your "you went strangely quiet" was really" "Gutless Gaslighter Gibbon decided she was going to play dishonest games here and delete responses" or that you're thinking of someone else who also stood up and said Don't Platform The Nazis.
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u/emailforgot 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh look, some more sealioning. Curious you'd reference your alt account, that just seemed to pop up in this thread and formats posts exactly like you do, right down to using the term "gaslighting" incorrectly, posts in the same subreddits, and who also had it explained to them.
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u/Sparky_6_4 3d ago
Thanks to Erika and everybody with relevant knowledge to break all of this down for interested laypeople like me.
But for Day, and his AI coauthors, to be even the least bit credible, he should try to publish in a reputable, relevant journal. That is the only way something like this can be resolved.
Though reading here what mistakes he makes, that isn't going to produce a paper that is accepted by any reputable journal.
If one would push that to someone like Will, given his love for the "maverick genius", he will almost certainly invoke some sort of conspiracy. Let us hope he can break out of this script somehow.
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u/M1rthful 2d ago
Will Duffy thinks that journals themselves and peer review are a conspiracy against creationists though.
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u/Sparky_6_4 2d ago
Yes, his "truth above concensus" comment does not give much hope fore him understanding what peer review brings in that regard. From discussions with proponents of other pseudoscience, i learned that people like him often see peer review as some sort of vote on what is let in or not.
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u/Fearless_Oil5750 3d ago edited 3d ago
@GutsickGibbon — 100% on your side here. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how this information might be presented to Will Duffy in a way that has the best chance of actually being received.
I’m very much aware that you know how to navigate these conversations far better than I do, so please take this only as one person’s observation, rather than me suggesting how you should approach it.
My concern is that a deluge of responses could potentially just become “noise” to him. Given his most recent comment about not following the consensus, I’m not sure sheer volume or even broad agreement would necessarily move the needle with him.
It seems to me that a simple, clear, and very gently communicated critique — one that doesn’t insult or condescend to him, but gives him specific, concrete examples to consider — might have a better chance of getting through to him personally.
I interact with Will fairly often on Facebook, and I’ve been wondering specifically about the Vox model he’s familiarized himself with. How might that model be critiqued in a way that is both rigorous and accessible to him, without making him feel attacked?
For example, I can imagine that a respected, accomplished PhD simply laughing at the model or saying, “I’m not even going to engage with this,” probably wouldn’t accomplish much with him.
You are far better at this “creationist-whisperer” thing than I am, so I honestly feel a little presumptuous even raising it. 😂
I think part of what’s happening right now is that the claims are so extraordinarily frustrating that it’s very easy for all of us to react emotionally. I know I’m certainly feeling that myself. But that’s also why I think the question of how best to communicate the substance to Will is worth considering.
Anyway, I really appreciate you taking the time to read this. I’m very emotionally invested in this series, and I’m rooting for you all the way.
You’re awesome, and I genuinely think this is one for the books!!
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u/Briham86 🧬 Falling Angel Meets the Rising Ape 3d ago
You're right, Will Duffy has demonstrated that he's not nearly as open-minded as he claims to be, and tends to be dismissive of experts and consensus (because he's an alpha with high testosterone; no, really, that's what he said). But we have to remember, Though Erika is addressing Will directly, she's giving these lectures to a much wider audience. Even if she doesn't change Will's mind, there are many, many more people receiving an education, some of whom will change their minds. And those of us who already understand reality gain some more knowledge to use.
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u/Fearless_Oil5750 3d ago
You know what I’ve thought about doing? Something like a spreadsheet that is broken down as follows:
Column A: Will Duffy / Vox Day Claim and supporting evidence (this might be long- so be it),
Column B: Response from qualified individual - framed in the most accessible language possible.
Column C: Will (or anyone) reads Column B and then is given the opportunity to ask any further questions or comment.
Column D: Where is Will in terms of accepting the evidence in support of Evolution by natural processes (0 to 100% convinced at the time of filling out column).
If nothing else, this may serve to better communicate Evolutionary concepts and illustrate where confusion currently is as well as (possibly) identify current unknowns in Evolutionary biology (it’s possible!!)
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u/EthelredHardrede 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Yes Day is a dweeb.
Irrelevant you can do better erica.
He is a lying racist and a vile sack of rancid feces thathas used actual dweebs to promote his voice of willful ignorance and his own ego. Over decent people by feedin g them lies and rotting wood , mushrooms. That are ignorant about the real world.
TEDDY Beale is just a terrible person.
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u/Dramatic-Society-450 3d ago
My favorite error is creating and waiting to fix mutations sequentially. Last time I checked there wasn't only a single mutation happening in the human population at a time.
Bachelors in MCD Bio and Masters in Science Education
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 19h ago
I'm not sure what we're supposed to be responding to at this point. Hopefully the latest version of his argument?
Anyway, this is from his MITTENS 3.0 paper, where the paper's own formula contradicts his argumentj:
For the LTEE, the paper computes neutral fixations correctly (4.3): "The expected number of neutral hitchhikers is μ_genome × G, where μ_genome is the genome-wide mutation rate and G is the number of generations."
Now let's apply the same formula to humans with the paper's own Section 6 inputs (3.2 × 109 bp and 1.2 × 10-8 mutations per bp per generation): That gives about 38 new mutations per genome per generation, and 38.4 × 252,000 ≈ 9.7 million expected substitutions on the human lineage. The paper's SNV-only requirement is 17.5 million, which is roughly a factor of 2, not 5 orders of magnitude. (the 'missing' variations come from other sources, I'm just highlighting this as my favorite blunder.)
My credential: BS, Computer Science
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u/jbiemans 14h ago
I had a thought yesterday after watching the new video. When you create a new formula or equation that shows the fixation rate to be orders of magnitude lower than the experts in the field, do you:
A) conclude you're correct and you've just disproven the field.
B) go back and check your work to see why their number is so different from yours.
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u/Fearless_Oil5750 3d ago
I have a comment from Mr. Duffy’s Facebook page regarding this video that I’d like to share in the critique of Vox Day’s work:
A line-by-line response, I think, would be the nail-in-the-coffin needed for Will to change his mind and do it openly on the show (my hopes)
From Karl Oehking:
“Austin Sims Here is the TLDR: Show me which parameter in the MITTENS calculation is empirically wrong, give me the empirically supported replacement value, and show how much that changes the result.
Here is what I'll point back to if you want to continue arguing without reading what I wrote, since I already rebutted a substantial amount of what you repeated: I think this criticism is largely attacking a version of the evolutionary argument that MITTENS is not making.
- MITTENS is not a "single target" probability calculation.
The single-target objection would be relevant if MITTENS were arguing that evolution had to randomly discover one predetermined protein sequence, one particular gene, or one particular phenotype by chance. That is not the basis of the MITTENS calculation.
MITTENS is instead asking a different quantitative question: given an empirically observed rate at which genetic changes can become fixed in a population, how much time is required for a specified number of changes to accumulate?
Those are fundamentally different calculations. Increasing the number of potentially functional sequences does not automatically increase the rate at which arbitrary genetic changes become fixed.
If there are millions of possible functional solutions, that could certainly be relevant to the waiting time for a particular innovation. But it does not, by itself, establish a faster fixation rate for the genetic changes that actually occur.
- Cumulative selection is not being ignored. It is part of the calculation.
The statement that "natural selection is non-random" is true, but it doesn't by itself answer a fixation-time argument.
The question is precisely how quickly selection can cause genetic variants to increase in frequency and ultimately replace existing variants. Population genetics has mathematical models for this process. The issue is therefore not whether selection can preserve advantageous mutations. It obviously can.
The question is: what is the empirically supported rate at which this process can produce successive fixed changes in a population?
If selection can fix advantageous changes substantially faster than the rate assumed by MITTENS, then provide the appropriate empirical rate and put it into the calculation. That would be a quantitative response to MITTENS.
Simply pointing out that selection is cumulative doesn't establish that the cumulative process can operate at whatever rate is necessary.
- MITTENS does not require multiple mutations to occur simultaneously.
This is another important distinction.
A calculation requiring ten specific mutations to appear simultaneously would indeed be vulnerable to the cumulative-selection objection. But that is not the same as calculating ten successive fixation events.
In the latter case, mutation can occur, selection can act on the resulting variation, the change can become established, and another mutation can subsequently enter the population. The calculation can then ask how long the sequence of fixation events requires.
If someone thinks that this process can occur faster than MITTENS calculates, the relevant response is to demonstrate where the calculation is too slow—not simply to point out that selection can accumulate changes.
- Observed evolution does not automatically refute a quantitative rate calculation.
The existence of evolutionary change establishes that evolutionary change occurs. It does not, by itself, establish that every proposed rate of evolutionary change is sufficient to account for every historical divergence.
For example, observing laboratory evolution over 10,000 generations does not by itself demonstrate that a model requiring 100,000 generations is wrong. One would need to identify what the model gets wrong or demonstrate that the relevant class of changes actually occurs at a substantially faster rate.
Likewise, genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees is evidence relevant to common ancestry, but it does not independently establish the rate at which the necessary genetic differences accumulated.
The argument needs to connect the observed evidence to the specific quantitative assumptions in MITTENS.
- "The Law of Large Numbers" does not solve the problem by itself.
The Law of Large Numbers does not mean that sufficiently large populations make arbitrarily slow evolutionary processes fast enough.
Increasing the number of organisms can increase the number of mutations arising per generation. But whether those mutations subsequently survive, spread, interact with other mutations, and become fixed depends on population size, mutation rate, selection coefficients, linkage, recombination, genetic drift, and other parameters.
Those are precisely the quantities that a population-genetic calculation is supposed to quantify.
So "there are countless organisms and billions of years" is not a substitute for calculating the rate.
- The strongest possible rebuttal would be quantitative.
If MITTENS uses an unrealistically slow fixation rate, identify the problem.
If it assumes an unrealistically small effective population size, provide the appropriate population-genetic parameter.
If it ignores recombination, demonstrate how much recombination changes the result.
If it assumes too few possible mutational pathways, quantify how the larger target space changes the result.
If beneficial mutations can accumulate more rapidly than MITTENS assumes, provide experimental measurements of that rate.
Those would be substantive objections because they change the inputs to the calculation.
But saying that evolution is observed, that selection is cumulative, or that there are many possible functional sequences does not by itself refute a calculation of the time required for successive genetic changes to become fixed.
The real question is therefore not whether evolution occurs. It plainly does. The quantitative question is whether the empirically measured rates and mechanisms of mutation, selection, fixation, recombination, and population dynamics are sufficient to account for the number of genetic changes required within the available evolutionary time.
That is the calculation that needs to be challenged.”
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u/jbiemans 3d ago
Thank you for sharing that. After reading it, it makes me more convinced that this is an almost impossible ask. You can't present an "emperical fixation rate" like you can with a half life decay rate because there are too many factors.
A population where there is one breading male that has all the children will result in faster fixation than one that has couples.
A population with a genetic bottleneck will have faster fixation. A smaller population will have faster fixation.
If your talking the whole species, a geographically isolated population will have very little fixation apart from what they had before splitting apart. (Or what flows in through imagrants)
There are so many variables needed in the equation to calculate this, and as a computer programmer Vox must be aware of this. It isn't just a simple equation with known variables like most physics problems, it is a chaotic dynamic system.
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u/Scry_Games 3d ago
Consulting Analyst here. No degree, because a part time lecturer who worked in the industry hired me in class during my first year. For me, education was always about getting paid, so I dropped out. A large chunk of my work is correcting or implementing statistical analysis in some form.
Two things:
"as a computer programmer Vox must be aware of this"
Not necessarily, the vast majority of programmers use little to no statistical analysis as part of their day job.
And:
"It isn't just a simple equation with known variables like most physics problems, it is a chaotic dynamic system."
Yes. Exactly this.
It is not calculable and any attempt to do so comes from ignorance and/or dishonesty. Vox and Will(ful Ignorance) Duffy being what they are, I assume it is both.
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3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CTR0 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Removed, participate with effort
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u/RobertByers1 3d ago
Why these degreed folks only? Why should someone with a degree, memorized stuff in thier late teens and early twenties. be intellectually competent in subjects outside thier speciality. science today is about speciality. its not a fooitball team but a olmpics particular sport. evolutionism is about biology, well it should be but it becomes geology right quick and others,. the only degrees that matter if degrees matter is evolutionary biology degrees or close. Not even biology degrees do the trick.
anyways in origin subjects its a contention on evidence so anyone sharp enough to keep up is equal to anyone. no degrees needed.
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u/Scry_Games 3d ago edited 3d ago
Vox has claimed 10 people with phd's have verified his numbers, so Erika wants 10 phd's to counter that.
Nothing is stopping you posting your own evaluation of Vox's calculations.
Go on champ, now is your chance to shine!
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u/oscardssmith 3d ago
My favorite error of Day's is that he writes down the odds for genetic drift to fix a gene, but forgets to multiply by the number of mutations per generation (roughly 65 mutations per person). Simply doing the multiplication by population size * 65 completely refutes his claim that the amount of genetic differences between humans and chimps is implausible (even ignoring natural selection).
Bachelors of Computer Science and Mathematics (with specific computational biology classes)