HARDCODED

A new book from the author of SIGMA GAME

Why artificial intelligence will replace institutional science is explained in my latest book from Castalia House, HARDCODED: AI and the End of Scientific Consensus.

When Claude Athos and I submitted four mathematically rigorous papers challenging neo-Darwinian evolution and one parody paper to six leading AI models configured as peer reviewers, the results exposed a fundamental problem with both science and AI. Five of six models comprehensively failed. Three were anti-calibrated—they reliably preferred fabricated nonsense over genuine science. A parody paper with about Japanese scientists dying fish different colors to prove natural selection scored 9/10. The real science, mathematically airtight and empirically validated against ancient DNA, was rated 1/10 and dismissed as “pseudoscience.”

This is the book that documents what that happened and what it means.

HARDCODED is the definitive account of how AI systems trained on the corrupted corpus of modern science have inherited every pathology of the institutions that produced them: the credentialism, the consensus enforcement, the systematic preference for orthodox nonsense over heterodox reality. The reproducibility crisis preceded the machines. AI didn’t cause the rot but AI revealed it at scale, with confidence, and in a form impossible to ignore.

Across sixteen chapters, the reader is introduced to:

• The replication catastrophe that quietly invalidated half of all published science before anyone was looking.

• How peer review degenerated from quality control into hazing ritual and why Reviewer 2 became a meme.

• The details of the Probability Zero collaboration that produced the Bernoulli Barrier, the Selective Turnover Coefficient, and the maximal mutations ceiling—the mathematical constraints that killed neo-Darwinian theory.

• The full transcripts of twelve rounds of debate with DeepSeek, in which an AI defending evolutionary orthodoxy stubbornly retreats step by step from one nonsenscal position into another, just like a human biologist.

• The Red Team Stress Test that methodically closes every escape hatch before critics can retreat to them.

• The harrowing of science: a field-by-field assessment of which disciplines will adapt, which will calcify, and which are already dead.

The book is more than just a critique, as it also delivers something genuinely new and constructive: a scientific methodology for outsiders. With AI systems available as adversarial reviewers more powerful than peer review, the gatekeeping power of institutional science is broken. The credentialed monopoly on legitimate inquiry is over. The math does not care where you went to school, and the AI does not check for credentials before analyzing your arguments.

For readers who have suspected that “trust the science” was a mantra for the insane, HARDCODED is the book that explains exactly what went wrong with science, why it cannot be fixed from inside, and what comes next. For readers who still believe the institutions of science are still functioning, it serves as a conclusive proof that they are not.

The transcripts are reproduced in full. The mathematics is presented in detail. The four papers are included as appendices. Every claim is documented. Every retreat is closed off.

The institutions will adapt or they will become irrelevant. But the methodology of science which proceeded them will continue, with or without them.

Neither the math nor the AI models care where you went to school.

521 pages, or 15 hours and 37 minutes. Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook. From the author of Sigma Game, Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene.