This post includes bird-like dinosaurs, prehistoric beardogs, the wondrous Chinese racoon dog, and my corrections of Day’s latest attacks on evolution.
I've saved your response for future reference. Excellent summary of our understanding of evolution.
Yes, the ID/creationist crowd disdains mere physical facts, preferring a top-down approach to science, which reflects their dualistic worldview. Real scientists build their case from the bottom up. Darwin braved a dangerous voyage to the Galapagos; E. O. Wilson tested his theories on ant populations in the islets of the Florida Keys; and Jane Goodall followed chimpanzee troops in the jungles of Tanzania to document their behavior. Those are examples of real research, as opposed to sitting in an air-conditioned office glomming and misinterpreting the work of others to prop up preconceived beliefs.
It's a complete waste of time, sadly, to engage Creationists like Vox Day with scientific fact based arguments. They may purport to engage in a faux-simile of such rational arguments, but it's all in service of an a priori faith-based premise, which they want to be true.
He’s not a creationist. So tired of these straw man arguments. The question isn’t whether the species evidenced in the fossil record occurred in said order, rather what causal mechanism is feasible. Simply claiming a naturalistic evolutionary mechanism *must* have occurred because [points to fossil record] isn’t a scientific argument.
Smiling. Well are you suggesting the first human, first horse, first wolf, etc., weren’t born? Are you actually arguing God (or aliens) just keep zapping increasingly more modern animals into existence right while the older ones are dying out? And has done this for billions of years everywhere on Earth, including islands? Notice how evolution predicted this fossil record in advance. Finally, my article provides many more proofs of evolution than referring to the fossil record.
“Forms”, “kinds”, and special pleading: you’re doing a great service to the broader readership with your excellent posts, and I am confident you’re not actually expecting to convince the cdesign proponentsists.
Forgive the smugness. But we don’t find, most modern mammals in the fossil records, say, 15 million years ago. But we find ancestral forms that slightly resemble them. So what happened? Are those seemingly ancestral taxa actually ancestral to the modern forms or …? If you deny that these fossil taxa are ancestral (or related to the ancestors), then modern mammals had to pop into existence some other way.
I’ve seen that. It’s a non-response. He does not directly challenge any of my corrections in the post. And do you really think I can’t divide 400 million by 6 million?
I could be misinterpreting here, but I think that I may see why he responded the way that he did. It looks like, even though you specifically asked him to, he hasn't given the full versions of his latest relevant arguments in his blog posts addressing you or the comments sections here. He may be expecting you to either address the arguments presented in the latest version of his book and his Zenodo papers or play his game where he asks you basic math questions to step through his arguments. Not doing so may be what he considers to be "ignoring the conclusive mathematical disproof of both evolution by natural selection and evolution by genetic drift". Again, I could have this all wrong, but this is how it appears to me after reading the exchange and knowing some of the context.
I haven't seen the latest version of his book, but I have been going through his Zenodo papers and am trying to organize my notes into one or more responses. I posted some comments on his "Bernoulli barrier" argument, but I don't know if he has even seen them.
Dennis, the same patterns in the body of evidence are compatible with several different accounts of how the diversity arose. You know that. Vox is specifically attacking natural selection as the primary creative cause. There are scientists working inside evolutionary biology today who are also questioning whether classic natural selection is as sufficient or central as the Modern Synthesis claims.
You seem not to have read anything of our debate. Vox is literally claiming evolution by natural selection has never occurred. His subtitle is that it is mathematically impossible.
In the interest of precision and keeping things simple, I am specifically and literally claiming that no vertebrate mammalian species has ever originated through evolution by natural selection, by genetic drift, or any combination thereof. The math clearly and undeniably precludes the possibility.
To put this in perspective, it's roughly akin to telling everyone that you walked from New York City to Los Angeles in five seconds. We all know that never happened because it's not possible.
And talking about how some people really do live in Los Angeles while others have been confirmed to live in New York City do absolutely nothing to prove that you did complete that walk in that amount of time.
Basing your argument purely on math assumes you know all the pertinent factors involved.
Lord Kelvin calculated the age of the Earth at 20 million years old. He based his math -- which was sound -- on the time it would take for a molten planet to cool enough to sustain life. His conclusions would have devastated Darwin's theory since natural selection required hundreds of millions of years for speciation to occur.
But Kelvin did not know that radioactivity also heated the Earth, which invalidated his assumptions.
The abundance of evidence from paleontology, comparative anatomy, geology, and molecular biology is still there, demanding an explanation. And the modern synthesis is the best, most useful explanation we have.
Think that through. Your analogy supports the case against natural selection, not the case for it. I'm the one who is pointing out the absolute need for a missing factor...
And that factor has to speed things up a lot faster than radioactivity heated the Earth and expanded 20 million to 4.54 billion. That's only a factor of 227x. Neo-Darwinism needs a LOT more than that.
Hard evidence cannot be tossed aside, and the mountains of evidence from the scientific disciplines I mentioned above create a clear picture of species arising, adapting, and dying off. Science does not have all the answers, but resorting to demons, angelic beings, and gods as an explanation is not science.
Yes, Mike. All of that evidence can, must, and will be tossed aside. It's not just flat-out wrong, it's totally impossible. It's downright ridiculous once you actually grasp the mathematical reality involved.
The recent studies that completed the first genomes have conclusively terminated Neo-Darwinism. The math was clear since 1966, but now the genetic evidence supports the math, and not the "mountains" of circumstantial evidence. Since the first of those studies were only published last year, it's understandable that it's going to take a decade or more for their consequences to percolate through the various scientific communities.
Do you ever wonder why all the alien talk by the government started up suddenly last year? My strong suspicion is that this is why. In 20 years, no one will believe in evolution as a human origin anymore, and the ironic thing is that most of you will deny you ever did.
I still remember when everyone thought I was crazy because I knew there was a government agency called the NSA. Now they've all forgotten they ever denied its existence.
We'll see. If I'm correct, you're going to see more and more science gradually moving in that direction.
I'd be willing to bet that your "mountains of evidence from (paleontology, comparative anatomy, geology, and molecular biology)" is just so much question-begging. If your field assumes evolution and builds on top of it, evolution is not thereby proven. It remains an assumption.
The fact of micro-evolution (which was well known via breeding of domestic animals before anyone had heard of Darwin) does not prove macro-evolution. Your hand-waving is not evidence of anything.
Your sloppy, illogical reasoning is clear to everyone outside your cult. It goes back to Darwin, in fact, probably the most muddle-headed (alleged) scientist ever to have lived. Until you can master elementary logical reasoning, you should give up any ambition scientific theorizing.
I can’t speak for Vox, but there’s a difference between never occurring and being the primary mechanism. It’s been a while since I read the book. The math includes NS in the calculation so NS can occur, just as walking from NY to LA can occur, but is that enough?
My understanding of the argument is that even granting that NS plays a role in the process, the conclusion is it’s not enough to get you to the final destination given the allotted time. Same goes for drift and a combination of both. The argument isn’t NS and drift never occur.
Stephen writes: "Vox is specifically attacking natural selection as the primary creative cause." Stephen then writes: "I can't speak for Vox"
Well, then stop trying to. But if you and Vox do agree Darwin was correct and that species can transform due to natural selection, I welcome you to the winning side. My entire proof was proving the elegance of the theory, its irrefutability, and that there has essentially never been any giant transformative leaps, but that it's microevolution all the way down.
Yes, Vox tried to make the claim that natural selection did not have enough time, but never once challenged natural selection or rate of beneficial mutations. Instead, he focused exclusively on neutral mutations and Kimura’s theory— and was wrong about that, as I showed. Do you have some point here? Do you want to challenge my math?
Dennis, it now appears that you not only didn't read the book, but you still don't even know what I'm talking about. Do you accept that natural selection cannot possibly account for the genetic differences between chimp and human?
That is my core argument. Kimura and neutral theory don't even begin to enter into it. I have directly challenged natural selection. I am, in fact, asserting that natural selection is not responsible for the origin of any species anywhere.
From PROBABILITY ZERO:
The theory of evolution by natural selection has never been subjected to a quantitative audit against the actual scale of genetic divergence revealed by genomic data. We present MITTENS (Mutation, Isolation, Time, Transmission, Environment, Natural Selection, Sex), a framework identifying seven necessary conditions for speciation through natural selection. Applying this framework to human-chimpanzee divergence using the telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies of Yoo et al. (2025)—which document approximately 410 million total genomic differences between the two species—we calculate that natural selection can accomplish at most 180 fixations on the human lineage given 252,000 generations and 1,400 generations per fixation (the fastest empirical rate ever measured in any organism). This represents 0.000088% of the approximately 205 million fixations required on the human lineage. The shortfall is 1,139,000-fold. Scaling analysis across 18 species pairs spanning the tree of life confirms universal failure for sexually reproducing lineages. The mechanism does not work.
It isn't mathematically impossible as I''ve shown (and you can't respond to)--and this is just getting sillier. Pigs are useful in some medical research because certain organs, skin, metabolism, and cardiovascular features resemble ours. But that does not make them biologically closer to humans than primates are. Humans are primates, and chimpanzees and bonobos are far closer to us genetically and evolutionarily. In fact, drug toxicity testing commonly begins with rodents, followed by a suitable non-rodent species such as dogs, monkeys, or minipigs. Different animals are used because they are good models for different biological systems—not because pigs are our closest biochemical match. It's a preposterous thing to claim. Okay, it's getting about time to end this thread. Do you have thing substantive to add?
So many, many examples of evolution, but no conclusive evidence that it can occur through natural selection and neutral drift alone. The mathematical challenge of there simply not being nearly enough time from the evolutionary ancestor to the current form, given current genetic science, remains unanswered.
Evolution through natural selection, which was once a scientific theory, has by now become cult dogma, an article of faith - despite the fact that the mathematical falsification of the theory has been verified by numerous top AI engines.
Due to the intransigence of human nature, and the vested interests of established "scientists", major fallifications like this generally take many years to penetrate the entrenched conventional wisdom. I imagine that that will be the case here, as well.
Dennis have you considered becoming the new SJ Gould with his This View of Life series in Natural History? You seem a natural heir.
Dennis is evolving in that direction. 😉
Dennis,
I've saved your response for future reference. Excellent summary of our understanding of evolution.
Yes, the ID/creationist crowd disdains mere physical facts, preferring a top-down approach to science, which reflects their dualistic worldview. Real scientists build their case from the bottom up. Darwin braved a dangerous voyage to the Galapagos; E. O. Wilson tested his theories on ant populations in the islets of the Florida Keys; and Jane Goodall followed chimpanzee troops in the jungles of Tanzania to document their behavior. Those are examples of real research, as opposed to sitting in an air-conditioned office glomming and misinterpreting the work of others to prop up preconceived beliefs.
Awesome! You are an arithmetician on top of everything else
Vox's response: https://voxday.net/2026/09/17/the-math-is-too-hard/
It's a complete waste of time, sadly, to engage Creationists like Vox Day with scientific fact based arguments. They may purport to engage in a faux-simile of such rational arguments, but it's all in service of an a priori faith-based premise, which they want to be true.
He’s not a creationist. So tired of these straw man arguments. The question isn’t whether the species evidenced in the fossil record occurred in said order, rather what causal mechanism is feasible. Simply claiming a naturalistic evolutionary mechanism *must* have occurred because [points to fossil record] isn’t a scientific argument.
Smiling. Well are you suggesting the first human, first horse, first wolf, etc., weren’t born? Are you actually arguing God (or aliens) just keep zapping increasingly more modern animals into existence right while the older ones are dying out? And has done this for billions of years everywhere on Earth, including islands? Notice how evolution predicted this fossil record in advance. Finally, my article provides many more proofs of evolution than referring to the fossil record.
“Forms”, “kinds”, and special pleading: you’re doing a great service to the broader readership with your excellent posts, and I am confident you’re not actually expecting to convince the cdesign proponentsists.
And terrible math skills 🤦♂️
Smugness.
No. Why would those be the necessary alternatives to random fixations in an impossible timeframe? This is the straw man.
Does one have to suggest an alternative to debunk the current orthodoxy? Are those the only ones you can think of?
Forgive the smugness. But we don’t find, most modern mammals in the fossil records, say, 15 million years ago. But we find ancestral forms that slightly resemble them. So what happened? Are those seemingly ancestral taxa actually ancestral to the modern forms or …? If you deny that these fossil taxa are ancestral (or related to the ancestors), then modern mammals had to pop into existence some other way.
Vox Day’s reply:
https://voxday.net/2026/09/17/the-math-is-too-hard/
I’ve seen that. It’s a non-response. He does not directly challenge any of my corrections in the post. And do you really think I can’t divide 400 million by 6 million?
I could be misinterpreting here, but I think that I may see why he responded the way that he did. It looks like, even though you specifically asked him to, he hasn't given the full versions of his latest relevant arguments in his blog posts addressing you or the comments sections here. He may be expecting you to either address the arguments presented in the latest version of his book and his Zenodo papers or play his game where he asks you basic math questions to step through his arguments. Not doing so may be what he considers to be "ignoring the conclusive mathematical disproof of both evolution by natural selection and evolution by genetic drift". Again, I could have this all wrong, but this is how it appears to me after reading the exchange and knowing some of the context.
I haven't seen the latest version of his book, but I have been going through his Zenodo papers and am trying to organize my notes into one or more responses. I posted some comments on his "Bernoulli barrier" argument, but I don't know if he has even seen them.
https://dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/why-probability-zero-is-wrong-about-0d1/comment/338963242
Dennis, the same patterns in the body of evidence are compatible with several different accounts of how the diversity arose. You know that. Vox is specifically attacking natural selection as the primary creative cause. There are scientists working inside evolutionary biology today who are also questioning whether classic natural selection is as sufficient or central as the Modern Synthesis claims.
You seem not to have read anything of our debate. Vox is literally claiming evolution by natural selection has never occurred. His subtitle is that it is mathematically impossible.
In the interest of precision and keeping things simple, I am specifically and literally claiming that no vertebrate mammalian species has ever originated through evolution by natural selection, by genetic drift, or any combination thereof. The math clearly and undeniably precludes the possibility.
To put this in perspective, it's roughly akin to telling everyone that you walked from New York City to Los Angeles in five seconds. We all know that never happened because it's not possible.
And talking about how some people really do live in Los Angeles while others have been confirmed to live in New York City do absolutely nothing to prove that you did complete that walk in that amount of time.
Basing your argument purely on math assumes you know all the pertinent factors involved.
Lord Kelvin calculated the age of the Earth at 20 million years old. He based his math -- which was sound -- on the time it would take for a molten planet to cool enough to sustain life. His conclusions would have devastated Darwin's theory since natural selection required hundreds of millions of years for speciation to occur.
But Kelvin did not know that radioactivity also heated the Earth, which invalidated his assumptions.
The abundance of evidence from paleontology, comparative anatomy, geology, and molecular biology is still there, demanding an explanation. And the modern synthesis is the best, most useful explanation we have.
Think that through. Your analogy supports the case against natural selection, not the case for it. I'm the one who is pointing out the absolute need for a missing factor...
And that factor has to speed things up a lot faster than radioactivity heated the Earth and expanded 20 million to 4.54 billion. That's only a factor of 227x. Neo-Darwinism needs a LOT more than that.
Hard evidence cannot be tossed aside, and the mountains of evidence from the scientific disciplines I mentioned above create a clear picture of species arising, adapting, and dying off. Science does not have all the answers, but resorting to demons, angelic beings, and gods as an explanation is not science.
Yes, Mike. All of that evidence can, must, and will be tossed aside. It's not just flat-out wrong, it's totally impossible. It's downright ridiculous once you actually grasp the mathematical reality involved.
The recent studies that completed the first genomes have conclusively terminated Neo-Darwinism. The math was clear since 1966, but now the genetic evidence supports the math, and not the "mountains" of circumstantial evidence. Since the first of those studies were only published last year, it's understandable that it's going to take a decade or more for their consequences to percolate through the various scientific communities.
Do you ever wonder why all the alien talk by the government started up suddenly last year? My strong suspicion is that this is why. In 20 years, no one will believe in evolution as a human origin anymore, and the ironic thing is that most of you will deny you ever did.
I still remember when everyone thought I was crazy because I knew there was a government agency called the NSA. Now they've all forgotten they ever denied its existence.
We'll see. If I'm correct, you're going to see more and more science gradually moving in that direction.
I'd be willing to bet that your "mountains of evidence from (paleontology, comparative anatomy, geology, and molecular biology)" is just so much question-begging. If your field assumes evolution and builds on top of it, evolution is not thereby proven. It remains an assumption.
The fact of micro-evolution (which was well known via breeding of domestic animals before anyone had heard of Darwin) does not prove macro-evolution. Your hand-waving is not evidence of anything.
Your sloppy, illogical reasoning is clear to everyone outside your cult. It goes back to Darwin, in fact, probably the most muddle-headed (alleged) scientist ever to have lived. Until you can master elementary logical reasoning, you should give up any ambition scientific theorizing.
I can’t speak for Vox, but there’s a difference between never occurring and being the primary mechanism. It’s been a while since I read the book. The math includes NS in the calculation so NS can occur, just as walking from NY to LA can occur, but is that enough?
My understanding of the argument is that even granting that NS plays a role in the process, the conclusion is it’s not enough to get you to the final destination given the allotted time. Same goes for drift and a combination of both. The argument isn’t NS and drift never occur.
Stephen writes: "Vox is specifically attacking natural selection as the primary creative cause." Stephen then writes: "I can't speak for Vox"
Well, then stop trying to. But if you and Vox do agree Darwin was correct and that species can transform due to natural selection, I welcome you to the winning side. My entire proof was proving the elegance of the theory, its irrefutability, and that there has essentially never been any giant transformative leaps, but that it's microevolution all the way down.
I tried in the first comment, and made a point to not try in the next one. It’s not difficult to understand.
Yes, Vox tried to make the claim that natural selection did not have enough time, but never once challenged natural selection or rate of beneficial mutations. Instead, he focused exclusively on neutral mutations and Kimura’s theory— and was wrong about that, as I showed. Do you have some point here? Do you want to challenge my math?
Dennis, it now appears that you not only didn't read the book, but you still don't even know what I'm talking about. Do you accept that natural selection cannot possibly account for the genetic differences between chimp and human?
That is my core argument. Kimura and neutral theory don't even begin to enter into it. I have directly challenged natural selection. I am, in fact, asserting that natural selection is not responsible for the origin of any species anywhere.
From PROBABILITY ZERO:
The theory of evolution by natural selection has never been subjected to a quantitative audit against the actual scale of genetic divergence revealed by genomic data. We present MITTENS (Mutation, Isolation, Time, Transmission, Environment, Natural Selection, Sex), a framework identifying seven necessary conditions for speciation through natural selection. Applying this framework to human-chimpanzee divergence using the telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies of Yoo et al. (2025)—which document approximately 410 million total genomic differences between the two species—we calculate that natural selection can accomplish at most 180 fixations on the human lineage given 252,000 generations and 1,400 generations per fixation (the fastest empirical rate ever measured in any organism). This represents 0.000088% of the approximately 205 million fixations required on the human lineage. The shortfall is 1,139,000-fold. Scaling analysis across 18 species pairs spanning the tree of life confirms universal failure for sexually reproducing lineages. The mechanism does not work.
“Vox tried to make the claim that natural selection did not have enough time, but never once challenged natural selection”
He tried but didn’t try??? Genuinely don’t understand this.
It isn't mathematically impossible as I''ve shown (and you can't respond to)--and this is just getting sillier. Pigs are useful in some medical research because certain organs, skin, metabolism, and cardiovascular features resemble ours. But that does not make them biologically closer to humans than primates are. Humans are primates, and chimpanzees and bonobos are far closer to us genetically and evolutionarily. In fact, drug toxicity testing commonly begins with rodents, followed by a suitable non-rodent species such as dogs, monkeys, or minipigs. Different animals are used because they are good models for different biological systems—not because pigs are our closest biochemical match. It's a preposterous thing to claim. Okay, it's getting about time to end this thread. Do you have thing substantive to add?
So many, many examples of evolution, but no conclusive evidence that it can occur through natural selection and neutral drift alone. The mathematical challenge of there simply not being nearly enough time from the evolutionary ancestor to the current form, given current genetic science, remains unanswered.
Evolution through natural selection, which was once a scientific theory, has by now become cult dogma, an article of faith - despite the fact that the mathematical falsification of the theory has been verified by numerous top AI engines.
Due to the intransigence of human nature, and the vested interests of established "scientists", major fallifications like this generally take many years to penetrate the entrenched conventional wisdom. I imagine that that will be the case here, as well.
What I would like to know is where does God get all those crazy ideas from? Speaking strictly as a fan of they/their work.