We Knew How This Would Go

Gammas don't realize how AI anticipates them

Now, I knew perfectly well that the release of Probability Zero was going to bring out the Gammas. The fact that it has been successful, going straight to #1 in the Biology, Genetic Science, and Evolution categories, only cemented the likelihood that all of the Smart Boys were going to swarm and take the opportunity to demonstrate how very Smart they are by opining in ignorance and suggesting obvious alternatives that were already anticipated and addressed in the book, as I pointed out in chapter three:

What evolutionary biologists do is make up cute little stories, then invent cute little games with ESS models and speculate about how the way those games play out might illustrate their theories. It’s barely one step above playing Call of Duty and calling it science. This is because evolutionary biologists don’t dare do any studies or run any simulations that would falsify evolution by natural selection. They don’t permit the publication of papers that demonstrate natural selection can’t possibly be true, although, as we’ve already seen, they can’t understand them anyhow. And even if they did manage to stumble their way through one, we know perfectly well that they would turn around and claim that it wasn’t relevant for an absurd reason that they observably don’t even understand.

That’s exactly what they’ll do with this book. As you’ll see in the coming chapters, I already know exactly the ground to which they’ll retreat first, and the one they’ll retreat to after that. And the one after that.

Which brings us to the Gamma I inevitably encountered after an interview with me about the book was posted at Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, which is reasonably in depth and may be of interest to you. I very much doubt anyone here will be even remotely surprised to see how it went.

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GAMMA:

“Parallel fixation, then neutral theory, then ISL, and finally, the idea that adaptation can proceed without organism-level fixation. I’ve already addressed the first three, and I’m working on a conclusive refutation of the last one”

Perhaps Vox could explain exactly what he means by this? Evolutionary biology is not my primary field of expertise, but it seems to me there are plenty of genes that differ in frequency between, e.g, human sub-populations without being at fixation in any, including genes which presumably confer some fitness advantage (e.g for skin tone or lactose tolerance, which he is surely aware of.)

I’d also appreciate if Vox could explain some of his reasoning from an article from May last year, which I commented on here. I will reproduce my comments for convenience.

https://voxday.net/2025/05/27/ai-rejects-evolution/

...some cursory reading off wikipedia suggests that average-time-to-fixation for neutral mutations should be 4N generations, where N is effective population size. Vox’s article suggests that historical human populations were at least 55,000 individuals, which works out to ~5 million years for fixation of neutral mutations, assuming 25 years per generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(population_genetics)#Time

This kind of timescale would tend to result in fixation of every neutral mutation in the population, however, not just one, and many allele differences between humans and chimpanzees were in any case not ‘neutral’- these species were obviously under powerful and divergent selection pressures, and selection can operate on standing variation in a population without necessarily having to wait for de-novo mutations to occur. Moreover, the effective human population size may only have been 3000-7500 people due to various genetic bottleneck events.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1832099/

Overall, I don’t think Vox’s case is very persuasive.

Post-Scriptum: I have no idea why Darwinism is supposed to be the arch-villain of the enlightenment project here, given that Darwinism logically leads to eugenics, which is the arch-villain of the modern progressive left. I’m frankly shocked that both ToW and John Carter are peddling this kind of woo.

VD:

“Overall, I don’t think Vox’s case is very persuasive.”

You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You haven’t read my case and you are referring to the very models that I correct in the book because they are obviously incorrect in multiple ways.

You don’t even know the difference between Wright-Fisher or the various Kimura flavors, but all of them make the same mistake that you’re making by failing to take reproductive ceilings into account. For example, one neutral model requires women to have up to 9,000 children apiece to support its numbers.

“This kind of timescale would tend to result in fixation of every neutral mutation in the population.”

This alone should suffice to show you that you’re wrong. Infinity will not cause that to happen. See: Bernoulli’s Barrier and Ulam’s Noise.

GAMMA:

“You don’t even know the difference between Wright-Fisher or the various Kimura flavors”

No, I don’t, but you’re not explaining it very well, or explaining why every fixed allele would take millions of years in sequence instead of potentially being fixed in parallel, or explaining why adaptation would require genetic fixation at all.

VD:

Since you unwisely insist on criticizing without reading the book and complaining about explanations I never offered, I will spell it out very slowly and clearly for you.

1. The 1,600 generations per fixation rate INCLUDES parallel fixation. You cannot run to parallel fixation when it has already been taken into account.

2. The explanation is irrelevant. We already know how many fixations there are because both the human and chimp genomes have been mapped. Those 40 million fixations must be accounted for.

3. Adaptation without genetic fixation is inherently anti-Modern Synthesis. That’s more of an attack on Neo-Darwinism than anything I’ve written.

GAMMA:

The 1,600 generations per fixation rate INCLUDES parallel fixation. You cannot run to parallel fixation when it has already been taken into account.

Back in May, you were saying that only one fixation can occur in 6-10 million years (which is ~200,000 generations, not 1600.) Are you saying that the Wright–Fisher, Kimura and Moran models are all incorrect here, by orders of magnitude?

You don’t even know the difference between Wright-Fisher or the various Kimura flavors, but all of them make the same mistake that you’re making by failing to take reproductive ceilings into account.

I’m just going off ChatGTP here, so... feel free to correct me or link to a relevant article, but it looks like the main relevance of reproductive ceilings is how it impacts effective population size? We already know that number in humans. (It’s low, implying fixation at relatively rapid rates, not orders of magnitude slower.)

The explanation is irrelevant. We already know how many fixations there are because both the human and chimp genomes have been mapped. Those 40 million fixations must be accounted for.”

What is 40 million fixations compared to the size of the genome and the number of loci? If your argument is that there wouldn’t be time for that many de-novo mutations to accumulate, then as I pointed out, fixation of standing variation that existed at the time of our last common ancestor could have occurred instead, or in combination.

In any case, as I understand it, 200,000 generations with ~200 de-novo mutations per generation (which seems empirically plausible in humans) would result in ~40 million mutations over 5 million years? It would take about as long for such mutations to reach fixation (if they were all neutral, which they wouldn’t be), but the numbers are at least in the same ballpark.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08922-2

Even mutations that occur in non-coding regions of the genome can be driven to fixation by ‘genetic hitchhiking’ effects/linkage-disequilibrium, if they are close to coding variants that are under selection.

Adaptation without genetic fixation is inherently anti-Modern Synthesis. That’s more of an attack on Neo-Darwinism than anything I’ve written.

Are you saying that blacks and whites are not adapted to different levels of sun exposure? Or does this require that every allele for melanin expression in either population occur at either 0 or 100% frequency?

VD:

Read. The. Book. All of these things are addressed there. Stop trying to be a Smart Boy and try actually learning something instead of listening to yourself talk, because you observably have no idea what you’re talking about.

GAMMA:

Just so you know- “Buy My Book” as a sum-total argument is not a great way to persuade me to actually buy your book.

RANDOM COMMENTATOR:

My dude, would you prefer that he rewrite the book in the comments here instead of directing you to a source containing all the data you are seeking, and which is already nicely formatted for ease of use and understanding? Can you hear yourself?

GAMMA:

No, I don’t think this is fair. If Vox wanted to say “question X is addressed in chapter Y of my book” or “I discussed topic Z in my online article W, link below”, I might be inclined to be a little more charitable. Or he could at least point me at where the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory defines adaptation in terms of allele fixation.

He also explain exactly how Darwinism is the “most foundational enlightenment idea”, given that it is mutually incompatible with The Blank Slate, which is usually the villain of this piece.

VD:

I don’t want you to buy my book. I don’t want you to read my book. And I definitely won’t spend any more time answering your ignorant questions.

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Now here is the punchline that demonstrates my point about Gammas not understanding AI. I know how they think. I know they are going to run to AI and ask it questions about how to attack the mathematical case against Natural Selection. So, obviously, that’s what I did while writing the book. Every step of the way, I stress-tested the various elements with Gemini, Deepseek, ChatGPT, and cold instances of Claude Opus 4.5.

So I know exactly what, how, and in what order the self-appointed critics of the book are going to try attacking its arguments. And I have the comprehensive responses prepared to a level none of them can even imagine. There is a reason that Gemini 3 Pro rated the technical rigor of the book a 9.7, and that’s without the inclusion of 11 of the 13 supporting science papers.

This was the specific reference that amused the Dread Ilk: “Adaptation without genetic fixation”. Notice how he ran to it even though I’d pointed out that he would do so in the very quote that he cited to me!

You see, when I was asked how the Neo-Darwinians were going to progressively retreat from the demonstrated failure of natural selection the day before the book was released, I laid it out for them.

“The first one, and the most retarded one, will be parallel fixation. They’ll do this even though parallel fixation is already encompassed. Then they’ll retreat to genetic drift and neutral theory, which is why I actually spend more time on that than anything else in the book, even though it doesn’t rescue Neo-Darwinism. At this point, they’re trying to save the broad Modern Synthesis, but it won’t work. Finally, they’ll fall back to adaptation without genetic fixation.”

Or, as I put it in the paper written prior to the release of the book:

The MITTENS framework demonstrates that fixation throughput limits impose severe constraints on evolutionary transformation in sexually reproducing organisms. A common objection holds that adaptation can proceed without organism-level fixation through mechanisms including conditional regulatory changes, phenotypic plasticity, developmental reorganization, and polygenic frequency shifts. We term this the Non-Fixation Escape Hatch. While these mechanisms are biologically real, they do not eliminate throughput constraints—they relocate them.