Introduction to the Second Edition
Science moves at unpredictable speed. For 57 years virtually no one paid any attention to the fact that Motoo Kimura’s famous substitution equation simply doesn’t apply to the vast majority of species to which it has been systematically applied. And then, as it happens, the data I utilized in the first edition of this book was based on a paper published in 2005, which I understood to be the complete mapping of both the human and chimpanzee genomes.
As it turned out, that wasn’t entirely true. Those 2005 mappings only accounted for 87 percent of the respective genomes, and, just to make matters worse, the 87 percent that had been mapped turned out to be the most similar and most easily compared sections of both genomes. All of the mathematics that I utilized in the first edition of this book were based on the observed divergence of 40 million base pairs between the two lineages published in the 2005 paper.
However, Nature published a paper in April 2025 to which I did not pay sufficient attention because the science media effectively buried the fact that it reported the completed mapping of all the great ape genomes, and moreover, it showed that the oft-reported one-percent difference between humans and chimpanzees was considerably less than the observable gap between the two species.
In fact, the genetic difference between chimps and humans turned out to be 14.9 percent, with 410 million base pairs separating the two lineages since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor. This 10x increase in the number of observed differences between the two genomes has had, as you might expect, a tremendous impact on the arguments I presented in the first edition of this book. In fact, it made them approximately ten times more conclusive.
Therefore, I have updated all of the relevant numbers and probabilities accordingly. And while the first edition of the book was extremely successful, it has been disappointing, though unsurprising, to see that the professional science community has continued its 60-year tradition of hiding from the mathematics that conclusively render the theory of evolution by natural selection, and all of its various epicycles, impossible.
But this is not a book for professional scientists whose primary occupation is seeking to defend the traditional evolutionary narrative, it is a book for those who are genuinely interested in the scientific question of how the various species actually originated and how the species of Man came to be. Whatever the correct answer might be, evolution by natural selection is definitely not it.......
