There are flaws in PROBABILITY ZERO. There are mistakes. There aren’t very many, to be sure, but there are a few. That’s why I’m working on the second edition now, to address those little flaws and mistakes, and to bring the book up-to-date with the very latest scientific studies. At Reddit, a number of the regulars on the r/DebateEvolution have collectively assembled a 333-comment thread to refute a book that none of them have read. This is, of course, the safest way to refute a book if one is primarily concerned with convincing oneself instead of anyone who has actually read it. The critiques come in a recognizable pattern, as each objection sounds authoritative and self-assured, and each one collapses the moment it is checked against what the book actually says and the available scientific evidence.....
Each individual objection sounds vaguely plausible if you don’t understand it. None of them survives even rudimentary examination. The pattern is consistent: the critics have constructed a version of the book they can refute, instead of engaging with the version that exists. They attack a one-step random assembly model the book doesn’t use. They cite parallel fixation calculations that violate Haldane’s constraint. They wave at speciation events that bypass the Darwinian mechanism. They invoke whole genome duplications that don’t apply to the ape lineage. They appeal to the institutional consensus and call it refutation.
The book’s central claim is arithmetic. Either the fastest empirically measured fixation rate, applied across the available time, can produce the observed divergence — or it can’t. The arithmetic says it can’t, by four to six orders of magnitude depending on how generously you count.
The Reddit critics haven’t shown the arithmetic of PROBABILITY ZERO is wrong. They’ve only shown they don’t want to do the math themselves.
