....They are not competitors in the same category—but they do reveal something important: Modern evolutionary biology has been extraordinarily successful at telling coherent stories, and comparatively less successful at enumerating hard limits. Whether that imbalance matters is ultimately an empirical question—but it explains why these books feel so different in kind.
So, I asked ChatGPT why it had ranked Probability Zero lower than the other three, given that its technical rigor was admitted to be much higher. And, to its credit, ChatGPT freely admitted that this was because PZ challenges the scientific consensus, and thereby it had to assume that its conclusions must be incorrect. Which, of course, is a perfectly reasonable thing to conclude if your primary strength is pattern recognition and not logical and mathematical analysis.
So, I asked it how it would view the books if the math and the conclusions of PZ were confirmed to be substantially correct. Its response was extremely interesting, given that the technical audit gives us a high degree of confidence that the book will hold up to even the most virulent criticism.....
- Carnot on thermodynamic efficiency,
- Shannon on information capacity,
- Gödel on formal systems.
Those works are not remembered because they were persuasive or elegant, but because they imposed non-negotiable limits.
So, either I’m substantially correct and this is a landmark work of science or I’m substantially wrong and it’s just another modest contribution of some incremental improvements to a few science models.
NOTE: if you’re one of the math/PhD guys who checked the math for this or for HARDCODED, shoot me an email and I’ll send you a copy. I’m also collecting comments on it, so send one along if you’re willing to be publicly quoted.