Imagine that! The timelines of human evolution just magically changed again! And it’s really not good news for the Neo-Darwinians or the Modern Synthesis, while it simultaneously highlights the importance of Probability Zero and its mathematical approach to evolution.
A stunning discovery in a Moroccan cave is forcing scientists to reconsider the narrative of human origins. Unearthed from a site in Casablanca, 773,000-year-old fossils display a perplexing blend of ancient and modern features, suggesting that key traits of our species emerged far earlier and across a wider geographic area than previously believed….....
This sort of article really underlines the nature of the innumeracy of the archeologists as well as the biologists. It’s not that they can’t do the basic arithmetic involved, it’s that they have absolutely no idea what the numbers they are throwing around signify, or understand the necessary second- and third-order implications of changing both their numbers and their assumptions.
For example, the reason the Out of Africa hypothesis was so necessary to the evolutionary timeline is because it kept the whole species in a nice, tight little package, evolving together and fixating together over time. But geographic dispersion necessarily prevents universal fixation. So, let’s take a look at how this new finding changes the math, because it is a significant complication for the orthodox model.
If human traits were evolving “gradually and piecemeal across different populations” spanning Africa and Eurasia as early as 773,000 years ago, then fixation had to occur separately in each isolated population before those populations could contribute to modern humans. This isn’t parallel processing that helps the model, it’s the precise opposite. Each isolated population is a separate fixation bottleneck that must be traversed independently......
......The time requirement approximately doubles for those 10 million alleles (first fixation + migration + second fixation), while the original problem remains for the other 10 million.
Original shortfall: ~150,000-fold (from MITTENS)
Revised shortfall with geographic structure: ~300,000 to 450,000-fold
But this understates the issue. The real problem is that geographic structure reduces effective population size locally while increasing it globally.
- Small local populations mean more drift, which sounds helpful for fixation
- But small local populations also mean more mutations are lost to drift before they can spread
- And the global population that must eventually carry the fixed allele is larger than any local population, meaning the final fixation is harder
The multiregional model doesn’t help Neo-Darwinism. It creates a nested fixation problem: alleles must fix locally (possible but slow), then spread through migration (slow), then fix in the receiving population (slow again), then spread further (slow), until global fixation is achieved (slowest of all).
The mathematical impossibility of TENS was just multiplied by at least a factor of 3. Notice how every time they find new evidence and adjust the narrative to accommodate it, they make the mathematical problem worse. The Moroccan fossils can’t save Neo-Darwinism. They’re just another shovel of dirt on the coffin.
