Evolution as a fairy tale. I love it. The first book was a masterpiece so I will have to read the second. One question. Perhaps some of you have a better grasp of Vox Day's thought and can enlighten me. By the end I understood his argument as being Darwinian evolution was false. Tens was false and Mittens was true. Yet common descent still occurred with the fixation of traits being intelligently caused rather then random and fixed by natural election. A Gray-Day theory of evolution to replace the Darwinian view. But evolution as a fairy tale suggests a rejection of common descent. Did I misunderstand the point of Probability Zero?
Have not yet read the books, waiting for the print so as to write on the margins. The squealing from the establishment is along the lines of the cigarette industry fighting the tide of cigarettes causing cancer(s). Ridicule, defame, denigrate, attack, etc, the normal guilty party mechanisms. No facts but as they own the media, medical and govt.. Hmm, you seem to have struck a nerve
Congratulations to the SDL, a modern day Copernicus. May you fare better than he.
I am very much looking forward to purchasing the signed first editions when they are released in pig skin or cowhide. Thank you so much for this Herculean effort, SDL.
No, in fact, TFG will only be available in print there starting tomorrow. People just prefer to buy on Amazon at this point, so we'll use it while we can.
Finishing PZ now. Thank you for the analyses. Besides the rigor, I am enjoying the style, too. And it's motivating me to go back and review some math I haven't used in decades.
Back in the Flintstones era, when I was in high school biology, we were told, "Natural Selection never stops. We are all evolving, all the time." It was stated as an absolute.
Without math, I still caused some distress: what about horseshoe crabs? ~450M years, unchanged.
If humans evolved from primates in <30M years, under the constant pressure of "natural selection & evolution," then how can horsehoe crabs be unchanged?
The answer was unsatisfying: "well, they are perfectly adapted to their environment." I knew that was crap.
Back then, I wish I had the experience of 3 decades at sea, including deep submergence, that I have now. There is NO part of any ocean that is a static environment, even in the deepest abyssal trenches.
Not only does TENS fail to account for time required for various species' fixations, it cannot account for all the species that are UNchanged, often for multiple 100s of millions of years.
I had a related but opposite objection in my high school biology class: If all these creatures evolved into perfect adaptation for their environment, how does a rat/pig/goat/plant hop off a ship onto an island and within a generation not only thrive but displace most everything else in that ecosystem?
The incredible thing isn't that VD just did a mathematical elbow drop from the top rope on the entire bloated Darwinian-Academic Complex, but that it was allowed to go on for so long with no serious check of the math. Your name tells me you have a nuclear background as well. Imagine a nuclear power plant running with that lack of rigor. I think of all the double-checks I had to get on even the simplest calculation before changing core parameters.
27yrs total, 23 in submarines. Another 10 working various DOD stuff.
You are correct on power plant ops - you didn't touch anything without understanding what quantifiable changes were going to happen.
Just imagine an EOOW explaining to the CO that Rx power jumped an extra 10% after a 1sec shim because there was some vague handwave of, "unnacounted neutral neutron drift through a constrained control rod channel"? Instant death. On the spot.
My experience in this lane was asking … if everyone was equal - How, in all the different parts and ecosystems of the world, did everyone get to the current finish line at the same time? Either the races are different (blasphemy) or the theory doesn’t work.
I got a serving of word salad with a side of silence.
Probability Zero is a necessary book. It is very easy to describe and intuitive to understand the absurdly small probability of TENS etc by examining the mechanism. Of course the probability of asexually reproducing single cell organisms evolving into sexually reproducing multi cell organisms is zero. But there a simple rhetorical response: given enough time. Using numbers larger than most people can even conceptualize, they claim there are enough monkeys at the typewriters. While people can't handle these large numbers, math can, and Probability Zero delivers the proof. There is only one monkey typing, and he's using hunt and peck.
A major flaw in the monkey-typewriter argument is non-ergodicity, highlighted by Nissam Taleb. Basically there are specific premises that have to be true in order for 'given enough time we get all possible outcomes' to be valid as a defense. In brief if the system has traits like path dependency, absorbing states and irreversibility they CANNOT claim 'given enough time all outcomes may occur'. There are simply states that will NEVER happen even with infinity time in a non-ergodic system. An example is if the typewriters your monkeys use breaks after 10 pages - they will NEVER complete the works of Shakespeare no matter how many monkeys with 10-page typewriters you own, even if it's a billion billion monkeys. The typewriter just doesn't make enough pages.
Evolution has three major non-ergodic traits and thus you can never "get lucky". It has path dependency because you need to mutate a hand before you have a finger, it has absorbing states which are fail-states and if your mutant dies that's the end for his dice rolls, and it has irreversibility because you can't 're-do' your improper 'almost there' finger mutation for a better one.
Dennis McCarthy's critique relied on the same mechanism and mistake when he said, "The only difference between directed evolution of dogs and the natural evolution of wild species is not whether selection operates, but who does the selecting—humans in one case, the environment in the other." He missed that human selection (and intelligent selection by proxy) changes the rules of ergodicity entirely since humans can redefine viable states. It's as foolish as saying, "The only difference between metallurgy done at a refinery and at your house with a box of matches is who does the smelting". No, it's qualitatively different and there are outcomes that will never ever happen with the box of matches that are expected and even trivial with the refinery.
If a critic cannot prove evolution is an ergodic state they cannot even philosophically retreat to 'but large numbers...'.
“Dennis McCarthy's critique relied on the same mechanism and mistake when he said, "The only difference between directed evolution of dogs and the natural evolution of wild species is not whether selection operates, but who does the selecting—humans in one case, the environment in the other.”
It’s even worse than you stated. There is NO evolution of dogs, directed or otherwise.
They are still, all of them, even the little yappy ones, a subspecies of gray wolf. There are less than fifty fixed mutations differentiating dogs from gray wolves (all dogs have the allele and no wolves have it or vice versa). And the literature flat out says “even those differences disappear with a large enough sample size.”
And all dog types can mate with gray wolves (provided the logistics work out- you’d have to inseminate a lady wolf with chihuahua sperm probably) and produce fertile offspring.
So even the most intensive and longstanding breeding program that humans have undertaken on a mammal has only produced variation within the grey wolf species, it has not produced speciation.
What's amazing is that AI is filling the promise of 'peer review' by giving works a reliable second scrutiny. The next amazing thing is academia resisting AI because they always hated peer review and AI review is tearing their papers apart.
All those decades of effort, all the bribery, and weaseling their way into capturing the institution of peer review and of scientific publications, and it's all going POOF in relative moments.
I pressed ChatGPT on the math. Assume evolution is real and assume the 800k year old fossil evidence with modern traits shows the rate is slower than anticipated, when is the origin of humans? It didn't want to answer because it was "impossible" at a time when the only mammals were tiny, but after explaining this is a math exercise and not a serious attempt at pinpointing the origin of humans, it estimated the lineage began 100 million to 1 billion years ago. Even the conservative estimate is well into the time of dinosaurs.
If we were going with the math from Probability Zero, I don't think even a billion years would begin to approach the necessary amount of time, via natural selection. I think that AI was just hallucinating, as they often do.
I plugged in the article about the Moroccan cave fossils and Vox's blog post referencing 20 million fixations. The tough thing was getting AI to run the evolutionary model in reverse and give me an origin date because the conclusion is absurd.
Prefer he was doing MCI, streaming with Owen and mocking the absurdity of the narratives around current events, but we know this is more important for the future.
Most of us who've been reading the blog for a while didn't need any further convincing as soon as he pointed out there wasn't enough time for all those changes to happen, but alas he had to do a bunch more heavy lifting to write something unassailable for the sarcastic and faithless.
Among many, this may very well prove to be his greatest and enduring achievement too date. Somewhere, Ricardo is relieved his gaze has turned to Darwin... and I don't mean Ricky Ricardo.
I will never forget the moment reading The Return of the Great Depression where Vox demonstrated that the main economic indicators were constantly being revised and re-revised to fit the political narrative. Meaning they were less meaningful than the points in an episode of Who's Line is it Anyway?
Spiralling gammas are like the wake and eddies behind a boat in motion. Just a natural phenomena in response to something significant happening.
Wow. Catching a long-standing error like that is outstanding work.
Evolution as a fairy tale. I love it. The first book was a masterpiece so I will have to read the second. One question. Perhaps some of you have a better grasp of Vox Day's thought and can enlighten me. By the end I understood his argument as being Darwinian evolution was false. Tens was false and Mittens was true. Yet common descent still occurred with the fixation of traits being intelligently caused rather then random and fixed by natural election. A Gray-Day theory of evolution to replace the Darwinian view. But evolution as a fairy tale suggests a rejection of common descent. Did I misunderstand the point of Probability Zero?
No, you just mistakenly assumed that evolution as a fairy tail requires a rejection of common descent. Think more broadly, don't think binary.
Thanks.
Not sure which is better, that frozen DNA cover, or the thought of the math Darwin Reddit bros spiraling into the swirling mists of the dawnless past.
Will a leather omnibus of the science stuff and the Corporate Cancer/SJW's stuff happen?
Yes, and yes, eventually. But we need to get the first three out first.
Honestly, the sheer pleasure of watching the Just So stories die at the hands of better math is worth any delay in Sigma Game. Writing as a backer.
Hail Vox, greeting from an Ilk.
Have not yet read the books, waiting for the print so as to write on the margins. The squealing from the establishment is along the lines of the cigarette industry fighting the tide of cigarettes causing cancer(s). Ridicule, defame, denigrate, attack, etc, the normal guilty party mechanisms. No facts but as they own the media, medical and govt.. Hmm, you seem to have struck a nerve
Congratulations to the SDL, a modern day Copernicus. May you fare better than he.
I am very much looking forward to purchasing the signed first editions when they are released in pig skin or cowhide. Thank you so much for this Herculean effort, SDL.
will PZ also be available in digital over at NDM?
No, in fact, TFG will only be available in print there starting tomorrow. People just prefer to buy on Amazon at this point, so we'll use it while we can.
Amazon is definitely convenient but the license model is bullshit.
Most people, yes.
But when it's available, those of us who cannot, or will not, look forward to picking one up at NDM.
Excelsior.
Finishing PZ now. Thank you for the analyses. Besides the rigor, I am enjoying the style, too. And it's motivating me to go back and review some math I haven't used in decades.
Back in the Flintstones era, when I was in high school biology, we were told, "Natural Selection never stops. We are all evolving, all the time." It was stated as an absolute.
Without math, I still caused some distress: what about horseshoe crabs? ~450M years, unchanged.
If humans evolved from primates in <30M years, under the constant pressure of "natural selection & evolution," then how can horsehoe crabs be unchanged?
The answer was unsatisfying: "well, they are perfectly adapted to their environment." I knew that was crap.
Back then, I wish I had the experience of 3 decades at sea, including deep submergence, that I have now. There is NO part of any ocean that is a static environment, even in the deepest abyssal trenches.
Not only does TENS fail to account for time required for various species' fixations, it cannot account for all the species that are UNchanged, often for multiple 100s of millions of years.
I had a related but opposite objection in my high school biology class: If all these creatures evolved into perfect adaptation for their environment, how does a rat/pig/goat/plant hop off a ship onto an island and within a generation not only thrive but displace most everything else in that ecosystem?
The incredible thing isn't that VD just did a mathematical elbow drop from the top rope on the entire bloated Darwinian-Academic Complex, but that it was allowed to go on for so long with no serious check of the math. Your name tells me you have a nuclear background as well. Imagine a nuclear power plant running with that lack of rigor. I think of all the double-checks I had to get on even the simplest calculation before changing core parameters.
Yes.
27yrs total, 23 in submarines. Another 10 working various DOD stuff.
You are correct on power plant ops - you didn't touch anything without understanding what quantifiable changes were going to happen.
Just imagine an EOOW explaining to the CO that Rx power jumped an extra 10% after a 1sec shim because there was some vague handwave of, "unnacounted neutral neutron drift through a constrained control rod channel"? Instant death. On the spot.
My experience in this lane was asking … if everyone was equal - How, in all the different parts and ecosystems of the world, did everyone get to the current finish line at the same time? Either the races are different (blasphemy) or the theory doesn’t work.
I got a serving of word salad with a side of silence.
What a time to be alive
People rarely change their minds when presented with clear evidence.
And sadly, we can be sure "The Science" will do whatever it can to ensure that PZ isn't acknowledged in any way, shape, or form.
Probability Zero is a necessary book. It is very easy to describe and intuitive to understand the absurdly small probability of TENS etc by examining the mechanism. Of course the probability of asexually reproducing single cell organisms evolving into sexually reproducing multi cell organisms is zero. But there a simple rhetorical response: given enough time. Using numbers larger than most people can even conceptualize, they claim there are enough monkeys at the typewriters. While people can't handle these large numbers, math can, and Probability Zero delivers the proof. There is only one monkey typing, and he's using hunt and peck.
A major flaw in the monkey-typewriter argument is non-ergodicity, highlighted by Nissam Taleb. Basically there are specific premises that have to be true in order for 'given enough time we get all possible outcomes' to be valid as a defense. In brief if the system has traits like path dependency, absorbing states and irreversibility they CANNOT claim 'given enough time all outcomes may occur'. There are simply states that will NEVER happen even with infinity time in a non-ergodic system. An example is if the typewriters your monkeys use breaks after 10 pages - they will NEVER complete the works of Shakespeare no matter how many monkeys with 10-page typewriters you own, even if it's a billion billion monkeys. The typewriter just doesn't make enough pages.
Evolution has three major non-ergodic traits and thus you can never "get lucky". It has path dependency because you need to mutate a hand before you have a finger, it has absorbing states which are fail-states and if your mutant dies that's the end for his dice rolls, and it has irreversibility because you can't 're-do' your improper 'almost there' finger mutation for a better one.
Dennis McCarthy's critique relied on the same mechanism and mistake when he said, "The only difference between directed evolution of dogs and the natural evolution of wild species is not whether selection operates, but who does the selecting—humans in one case, the environment in the other." He missed that human selection (and intelligent selection by proxy) changes the rules of ergodicity entirely since humans can redefine viable states. It's as foolish as saying, "The only difference between metallurgy done at a refinery and at your house with a box of matches is who does the smelting". No, it's qualitatively different and there are outcomes that will never ever happen with the box of matches that are expected and even trivial with the refinery.
If a critic cannot prove evolution is an ergodic state they cannot even philosophically retreat to 'but large numbers...'.
“Dennis McCarthy's critique relied on the same mechanism and mistake when he said, "The only difference between directed evolution of dogs and the natural evolution of wild species is not whether selection operates, but who does the selecting—humans in one case, the environment in the other.”
It’s even worse than you stated. There is NO evolution of dogs, directed or otherwise.
They are still, all of them, even the little yappy ones, a subspecies of gray wolf. There are less than fifty fixed mutations differentiating dogs from gray wolves (all dogs have the allele and no wolves have it or vice versa). And the literature flat out says “even those differences disappear with a large enough sample size.”
And all dog types can mate with gray wolves (provided the logistics work out- you’d have to inseminate a lady wolf with chihuahua sperm probably) and produce fertile offspring.
So even the most intensive and longstanding breeding program that humans have undertaken on a mammal has only produced variation within the grey wolf species, it has not produced speciation.
What's amazing is that AI is filling the promise of 'peer review' by giving works a reliable second scrutiny. The next amazing thing is academia resisting AI because they always hated peer review and AI review is tearing their papers apart.
All those decades of effort, all the bribery, and weaseling their way into capturing the institution of peer review and of scientific publications, and it's all going POOF in relative moments.
I'm still torqued off at losing Science News.
Pass the popcorn.
I pressed ChatGPT on the math. Assume evolution is real and assume the 800k year old fossil evidence with modern traits shows the rate is slower than anticipated, when is the origin of humans? It didn't want to answer because it was "impossible" at a time when the only mammals were tiny, but after explaining this is a math exercise and not a serious attempt at pinpointing the origin of humans, it estimated the lineage began 100 million to 1 billion years ago. Even the conservative estimate is well into the time of dinosaurs.
There will come a time when AI models will acknowledge the term "Darwillion."
If we were going with the math from Probability Zero, I don't think even a billion years would begin to approach the necessary amount of time, via natural selection. I think that AI was just hallucinating, as they often do.
I plugged in the article about the Moroccan cave fossils and Vox's blog post referencing 20 million fixations. The tough thing was getting AI to run the evolutionary model in reverse and give me an origin date because the conclusion is absurd.
Not what some will want to hear, but this work is more important than the SSH book.
Darwinism is the idol that the priests of every blood thirsty demon for the last two centuries retreat to, and they will not let it go easily.
Agreed.
Prefer he was doing MCI, streaming with Owen and mocking the absurdity of the narratives around current events, but we know this is more important for the future.
Most of us who've been reading the blog for a while didn't need any further convincing as soon as he pointed out there wasn't enough time for all those changes to happen, but alas he had to do a bunch more heavy lifting to write something unassailable for the sarcastic and faithless.
Yes. Really, the opposition are the most devout believers in the church of atheism.
Among many, this may very well prove to be his greatest and enduring achievement too date. Somewhere, Ricardo is relieved his gaze has turned to Darwin... and I don't mean Ricky Ricardo.
Yeah, so, about that...
Did you do the math on Ricardo, too?
I will never forget "Ricardo? Retardo."
I will never forget the moment reading The Return of the Great Depression where Vox demonstrated that the main economic indicators were constantly being revised and re-revised to fit the political narrative. Meaning they were less meaningful than the points in an episode of Who's Line is it Anyway?