It’s not really visible yet, but some of the more credentialed people on both sides of the evolutionary debate are starting to take notice of Probability Zero and MITTENS. And, of course, the usual sort of suspects are, as always, focused on the irrelevant minutia, so I’m having to further refine the argument. Which, of course, only makes it even stronger and more conclusive than before.
Here’s the problem. Biologists are stupid and innumerate, so even when they do the hard work required, they neither analyze it nor report it in a coherent, relevant, and meaningful manner. As I pointed out in Appendix F of the first edition, the 1,600 per generation number was both a) wrong and b) garbage. The problem is that every number reported in the 2009 and 2017 papers are also irrelevant garbage. The 2009 numbers are particularly bad because many of the fixations counted were not actual fixations.
Never mind, of course, that the actual number is almost entirely irrelevant, because there isn’t a bacterial fixation number that will ever make the numbers work. But because I value precision and I am not a biologist, I’ve downloaded the data for all 60,000 generations of the 80,000 generations published – 40k more than Barrick utilized in the 2009 study – and had Athos crunch the data. I’ll put everything in the next MITTENS 3.0 paper, but here are the highlights:
