Vox Day’s recent book, Probability Zero, argues that the mathematics of evolution by natural selection don’t add up. The response from the “evolution scientist” community has been remarkable, as they’ve all but gotten themselves into a panic over people reading it.
YouTube creator Gutsick Gibbon, joined by Dr. Hanson, released a video running roughly three and a half hours that responds to Day’s case. Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) said on camera that she hadn’t read the book and was responding to a presentation by Will Duffy. Within days, she announced she would read it, assemble friends with relevant training, and take it apart at a roundtable. She also asked anyone with a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate who had reviewed Day’s work to post their credentials and a “favorite blunder” for use in a coming video. A headcount of degrees isn’t a rebuttal, but it seems to be more of an abject panic as she doesn’t seem to have the confidence to simply rebut the material herself: the effort is going into organizing a response before the argument itself has been engaged. This isn’t the way science is supposed to be conducted; she’s urging the community to create consensus that the theory is wrong before even reading it, to come up with reasons why later. It shows how corrupt the scientific field is in real time, something Day has been demonstrating for years and now has solid proof that this is how they act because of his book.
Day’s answer was good-humored. He cast himself as Sauron, alone in Mordor against an army of credentialed foes, and told his readers to hold off on the comments and wait for the roundtable video before responding.
He has also gone after the scholarly side of the debate. In “The Best They’ve Got,” he reviews Jason Rosenhouse’s Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism, published by Cambridge University Press, and argues that its account of the 1966 Wistar Symposium, where mathematicians challenged biologists over the numbers behind natural selection, omits key exchanges from the transcript. He notes that the book doesn’t address his own mathematical argument, and a second installment on whether the Wistar challenges were ever answered is promised.
To commemorate this, he made a music video which is very entertaining. “An Intelligent Groove,” from the Vibe Patrol, packs his fixation-rate argument into a funk track, and the comments show it landed. One viewer couldn’t believe he’d see King Julien, Earth, Wind & Fire, and “150 IQ-level mathematics” in one song. Another joked that the science had just lost its entire furry division. It’s funny, it’s catchy, and it gets a technical argument in front of people who would never open a paper.
The pattern is what stands out. A skeptic of the mainstream account of evolution publishes a mathematical argument, and the answer is marathon videos, credential drives, and organized reading groups. That level of mobilization suggests the other side is rattled by the mere existence of the argument, or at least knows the audience is paying attention.
The core claims are specific and testable: generations per fixation in the long-term E. coli experiment, and how that scales to human-chimp divergence. The data is public, so readers can look for themselves.
Probability Zero is a provocative read, and the music video is the best place to start. Have you read this critique of the theory of evolution by natural selection?
DNA is the best argument. The fact is that, of yeast's 6,000 genes, roughly 2,000–2,300 have ortholog groups in mammals. If we compare human DNA to that of apes and monkeys, the similarities are above 90%.
It looks like I can get this book for free from Kindle Unlimited, so maybe I will.
Your article reminds me of the "Republicans pounce" theme of mainstream news: to them, the news is not that something happened -- it's that those BAD people are using it.
That's where epigenetics and sexual selection come in