The Man Who Cannot Be Instructed

One always argues with a Gamma in vain.

One of the most remarkable things about Gammas is the way that they will never abandon their core position, no matter how comprehensively their every single assertion is systematically dismantled throughout the course of a discussion. As many of them are midwits, they are just intelligent enough to utilize relevant buzzwords and appeal to relevant authorities, albeit in an incorrect manner that is simultaneously opaque to the less intelligent and transparent to their intellectual superiors.

Gammas usually focus their attacks on the mentality or the motivations of whoever they are targeting. This allows them to appeal to their own imagination and manufacture the damning evidence that no one else is able to see. However, another tactic they often use is to argue that their target is wrong because “the math is bad” without ever once demonstrating any such thing. This is because math, to Gammas, is not an objective, verifiable calculation, but rather an Authority to whom one can generally appeal on the basis of some vague hand-waving.

Remember, Gammas are always and inevitably lazy. They literally never, ever, do the actual math to which they are appealing. It’s truly astounding once you realize that from the lowest fedora-sporting Internet atheist to the most famous public scientist, they never calculate anything beyond an appeal to temporal inevitability. This is why the “multiverse” is the ultimate Gamma argument; in a conceptual construct where everything is not only possible, but inevitable, the Gamma can never be wrong.

One of the easiest ways to confirm you’re dealing with a Gamma is to run down a little mental checklist of actions, including the following:

1. He makes a factual assertion with confidence that is not only wrong, but also indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of some element of the subject.

2. When corrected on an integral element of his erroneous argument, he doesn’t concede the argument, but immediately resorts to moving the goalposts.

3. He not only makes statements that necessarily contradict his previous statements, but fails to notice the contradictions, or understand what they signify for his initial argument.

4. He makes the argument personal in some way. Usually for the target, but always for himself.

5. Even after conceding an error, he will forget that he has done so and repeat an assertion that has already been shown to be incorrect - even when he has admitted it to be incorrect.

You will always see one or more of these things in every argument with a Gamma, and all of them in any debate that goes on long enough. As was the case earlier this year when a Gamma declared that my explication of MITTENS was incorrect due to - and I quote - “bad math”. Don’t pay attention to the subject matter here, the point is not to discuss evolution at all, but rather, the way in which the Gamma’s criticism is presented and defended by the Gamma.

---

It was with a bit of chagrin that I realized how, despite my best efforts to make every element of my case for the Mathematical Impossibility of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (MITTENS) easily intelligible, I had made precisely the same mistake that the symposium physicists did in 1966. Which is to say, I was requiring my critics to possess an ability to make a correct logical leap that is observably beyond the ability of most people, and had thereby rendered what should have been an incontrovertible argument theoretically contestable in the eyes of the average individual. MPAI strikes again.

Fortunately, a Darwinian true believer who lacked the necessary ability chose to inform me on Gab that the math in MITTENS was both “bad” and “wrong” without bothering to correct it.

1ST GOALPOST

I’m no biologist, and I do enjoy math. It pains me to see bad math, which is the only reason I keep on poking at this. Ultimately, it’s not even a math error, the error is in the priors. Asserting that 1600 fixations per generation is the highest possible fixation rate is the root.

First, it’s worth pointing out that setting a ceiling of 1600 fixations per generation would not be an error, and in fact is considerably higher than the highest possible fixation rate ever imagined by anyone. Second, I responded to him by pointing out that since he had somehow managed to reverse the relationship between generations and fixations, and was therefore asserting that it was reasonable to imagine a blistering and hitherto-unseen super-parallel rate of 1,600 fixations per generation, it was unlikely that he had truly been able to detect a mathematical error in what, after all, is some very basic math.

It will probably not surprise you to know that this obvious error neither stopped him nor slowed him down in the slightest:

2ND GOALPOST

If I said 1600 per generation, that was a typo. I am flawed, I do make the occasional mistake. That’s the rate for bacteria. Using it for chimps requires more than simply asserting it is so. I will concede that the math itself is correct. Vox is capable of multiplication. The analysis is flawed because the input is incorrect.

It is like taking the top speed of a snail (Best I could find is 0.2 miles per hour for the giant African land snail) and using that to claim we never went to the moon. 226000 miles / 0.2 miles per hour = 1,130,000 hours = 129 years. It has been less than 129 years since the Apollo program, so we can’t have made it there yet.

If you use the wrong starting values, the math leads you astray.

I responded by observing that now he had reversed the appropriate analogy as well. My argument for the mathematical impossibility of the theory of evolution by natural selection is much more akin to pointing out that since the maximum speed of a Moon rocket is the 24,791 mph recorded by Apollo 10, and since it took three days, three hours and 49 minutes for Apollo 11 to reach the Moon, any claim that a Giant African Land Snail travelling at 0.2 mph had flown to the Moon under its own power in less than 24 hours must be false.

This second correction somehow did not dissuade him from continuing to claim that while my math was admittedly correct, the mathematical argument it supported was still “weak”.

3RD GOALPOST

The rate of mutation is typically cited per individual per generation. The rate of fixation is of course a population-wide measure. The experiment in the 2009 Nature paper measured a fixation rate of 1 fixation per 1600 generations. The bacteria in the experiment have a rate of mutation of about 1/1000 per generation per individual.

The rate of fixation of neutral mutations is proportional to the rate of mutation (and with certain simplifying assumptions, is equal to the rate of mutation per individual per generation).

The rate of mutation per generation per individual in chimps and humans is on the rough order of 30, over four orders of magnitude higher than that of the bacteria. The rate of fixation will thus be proportionately higher. Using the correct rate of fixation produces numbers comparable to the ones evolutionary geneticists use in molecular clock calculations.

This is why Vox’s “mathematical” argument is weak – it’s using an invalid prior to come to an incorrect conclusion.

I therefore observed that in his attempted defense of neo-Darwinism, he was asserting that mutations fix four orders of magnitude faster ACROSS THE ENTIRE GLOBALLY-DISTRIBUTED SPECIES in both humans and chimpanzees alike than across a small population of laboratory bacteria, which is total nonsense because the fixation rate in laboratory bacteria in the 2009 study published in NATURE is the fastest ever observed by scientists.

I also pointed out his extrapolation that more mutations occurring in a growing, geographically-distributed, and more genetically complex species necessarily means that species will fixate much more quickly than the simpler species was a logical error. To be more precise, his baseless assertion was absolute and utter nonsense; since chimpanzees and humans are far more widely distributed than bacteria living in a single petri dish, any advantageous mutations making an appearance will tend to fixate much more slowly in their populations than in the bacteria.

In fact, the theory of natural selection even suggests that what is an advantageous mutation in one geographical area might well be a disadvantage elsewhere, thereby preventing its fixation. He was literally appealing to his own imagination rather than math, science, or any observable evidence, and he proved quite willing to continue standing upon that imaginary foundation.

4TH GOALPOST

Your math is still wrong. Fixation proceeds in parallel. The rate of fixation is equal to the rate of mutation, and the latter can be measured. (Former’s a touch harder, but some bacterial experiments have done it, and confirm the rate.) The rate of mutation needed for the genetic clock is within a factor of two of what’s observed now.

He was, of course, incorrect, as he was citing Wikipedia or some other Internet source without understanding it. As it happens, according to the scientific papers, the rate of fixation is absolutely not equal to the rate of mutation for a) any non-static population, or, b) any beneficial mutation, which happens to be the only kind of mutation that is relevant to the topic of fixation. Also, my critic apparently did not know that the original average of 1,600 generations per fixation reported in the NATURE study specifically included several mutations fixed in parallel.

---

Notice how many errors are blithely made without the Gamma ever slowing down to consider the implication of any of those errors for his underlying argument. He doesn’t hesitate to retreat to the next goalpost without ever acknowledging that he has abandoned the previous one. His attachment to his core position is emotional, and therefore no amount of information will suffice to move him from it; only emotional manipulation is powerful enough to dislodge him.

The Midwit Gamma always finds himself trying to juggle more balls than he can possibly handle.

What we have to conclude from this is that Gammas are intrinsically limited to the rhetorical level; they are among those whom Aristotle described as follows:

Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.

The Gamma is a man who cannot be instructed. Which is why there is absolutely no reason to waste any time engaging with him, unless one wishes to test the rhetorical vulnerabilities of one’s own arguments.