Preamble
Vox Day has worked as a novelist, nonfiction author, publisher, game designer, technology entrepreneur, musician, cultural commentator, and long-running blogger. He has developed a substantial readership largely outside conventional academic and media institutions, and his influence has come as much through the publishing ventures and intellectual communities he has built as through the large body of work he has written. His interests range across economics, politics, technology, religion, history, and imaginative literature.
This interview will concentrate on a narrower subject: Day’s challenge to evolutionary theory, especially the arguments developed in his recent books Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene. As an intelligent design proponent, I have my own arguments for thinking that evolutionary mechanisms face serious explanatory shortfalls. The aim of this conversation is to give Day the opportunity to present his strongest case against evolutionary theory and to examine how it withstands the strongest objections to it. Many related questions will arise in this interview, not least where he thinks we should go to replace the account of evolution he is attempting to refute.
This is a long and detailed interview, and I’m grateful to Day for taking the time to answer all the questions that follow. This interview came about through a correspondence with Day that resulted from a review of his book Probability Zero that I posted recently on this Substack. Day’s technical work on evolutionary theory appears at Zenodo, the free, general-purpose open repository for research run by CERN. You can view all his Zenodo articles by clicking here. Day works fast, and he just posted at Zenodo an article titled MITTENS 3.0, which expands on this interview by addressing a 2009 Jeffrey Barrick study on genome evolution. MITTENS 3.0 is available at here at Zenodo and immediately below for download: