Neither Mathews nor any of her supporting cast of PhDs understand the basic concepts of math. For some reason, biologists are totally unable to understand the concept of “an average” or “an average rate” or even grasp the fact that if something happens multiple times over a period of time, then an average rate for that activity or process must necessarily exist......
You said you drove the car from New York to LA last week. Fine. How fast did you drive? That is not a question about a universal automotive constant.
What do they imagine 4N_e is? It’s the average time to fixation for a neutral mutation. It’s right there in every population genetics textbook ever written. What do they think (2/s)·ln(2N_e·s) is? It’s the average time to fixation for a beneficial mutation with selection coefficient s. Kimura derived these. They are the expected values — the average rates — of stochastic processes. The entire field of population genetics is built on computing expected values for fixation times, substitution rates, and allele frequency trajectories. That’s exactly what the field does.
Their wind speed analogy is particularly self-defeating. Meteorologists absolutely use average wind speeds. They’re essential to climate modeling, building codes, wind energy engineering, and aviation. The existence of hurricanes doesn’t make the average meaningless, it just means the distribution has fat tails, which any competent scientist accounts for rather than throwing up their hands and declaring all averages to be useless. And if a meteorologist told you “the concept of average wind speed is meaningless,” you’d rightly question whether they understood their own field..........
