Unlike the mainstream science orthodoxy, I don’t feel any need to avoid admitting when I got something fundamentally wrong, fixing the problem, and revising my conclusions. Which, of course, is why I’m working on the new appendices for the second edition of Probability Zero rather than trying to defend, rationalize, and justify the various mistakes I made in the first edition, which were mostly the result of relying upon the consensus numbers produced in 2005 rather than the 2025 update of them......
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https://voxday.net/2026/05/07/a-retraction-and-a-revision/ .....The result of this retraction and revision is that the central critique of neutral theory survives and is now backed by two methodologically independent empirical tests rather than a theoretical framework with a contested parameter. Kimura’s identity is still wrong, the molecular clock as currently calibrated still overstates divergence times, and the Neo-Darwinian accounting of sequence evolution still rests on a Wright-Fisher idealization that doesn’t describe real populations. The fix is more conceptual than catastrophic and will require properly labeling what each constraint measures, accepting more modest recalibration magnitudes than Term 3 originally suggested, and grounding the falsification more solidly in the empirical evidence rather than theoretical derivation.
We did the best we could with what we had at the time of the original paper; the addition of the empirical data allows us to refine the framework and make the case stronger and more conclusive.
