Where Biologists Fear to Tread

The Redditors don’t even hesitate. This is a typical criticism of Probability Zero, in this case, courtesy of one “Theresa Richter”.

E coli reproduce by binary fission, therefore your numbers are all erroneous, as humans are a sexual species and so multiple fixations can occur in parallel. Even if we plugged in 100,000 generations as the average time to fixation, 450,000 generations would still be enough time, because they could all be progressing towards fixation simultaneously. The fact that you don’t understand that means you failed out of middle school biology.

This is a perfect example of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome in action. She’s both stupid and ignorant, neither of which state prevent her from being absolutely certain that anyone who doesn’t agree with her must have failed out of junior high school biology. Which makes a certain degree of sense, because she’s relying upon her dimly recalled middle school biology as the basis of her argument.

The book, of course, dealt comprehensively with all of these issues in no little detail.

First, E. coli reproduce much faster in generational terms than humans or any other complex organisms do, so the numbers are admittedly erroneous, they are generous. Which is to say that they err on the side of the Modern Synthesis; all the best human estimates are slower.

Second, multiple fixations do occur in parallel. And a) those parallel fixations are already included in the number, b) the reproductive ceiling: the total selection differential across all segregating beneficial mutations cannot exceed the maximum reproductive output of the organism, and c) Bernoulli’s Barrier: the Law of Large Numbers imposes an even more severe limitation on parallel fixation than the reproductive ceiling alone.

Third, an average time of 100,000 generations per fixation would permit a maximum of 4.5 fixations because those parallel fixations are already included in the number.

Fourth, there aren’t 450,000 generations. Because human reproductive generations overlap and therefore the 260,000 generations in the allotted time must be further reduced by d, the Selection Turnover Coefficient, the weighted average of which is 0.804 across the entirety of post-CHLCA history, to 209,040 generations.

Note to PZ readers: yes, the work continues. Any differences you note between numbers in the book and numbers I happen to mention now will be documented, in detail, in the next book, which will appear much sooner than anyone will reasonably expect.

Now, here’s the irony. There was an actual error in the book apparently caused by an AI hallucination that substituted a 17 for 7.65 for no discernible reason that anyone can ascertain. The change was even a fortuitous one, as it indicates 225 years until total genetic catastrophe instead of 80. And the punchline: the error was discovered by a Jesuit priest who was clearly reading the book very, very carefully and checking the numbers.

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Oh, George…

As some always suspected, George RR Martin is attempting to change the end of ASOIAF because he didn’t like how the audiences responded to his intended end to the epic fantasy saga:

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Martin said, “[The book’s ending is] going to be significantly different.”

“Some characters who are alive in my book are going to be dead in the show, and vice versa,” he added.

Now, obviously characters being dead in the show that are still alive in the books is already the case, but this is significantly different from what Martin was saying before the show ended and even immediately after it ended back in 2019.

Nevertheless, he shared some specifics about what he is now planning for his ending, “I was going to kill more people. Not the ones they killed [in the show]. They made it more of a happy ending. I don’t see a happy ending for Tyrion. His whole arc has been tragic from the first. I was going to have Sansa die, but she’s been so appealing in the show, maybe I’ll let her live …”

None of this changes his fundamental problem of having introduced FAR too many perspective characters, which is why it is unlikely that either THE WINDS OF WINTER or any more books in the series will ever be published in his lifetime.

And frankly, I think he should change the ending, assuming he is somehow able to find a way to wrap it up. Because the ending of the television show was terrible and indefensible in literally every single way. There was no sense in which it was either satisfying or made any sense; it would have been much better if he had shown the courage of his convictions and had the Night King triumph over all.

That’s what his crabbed little soul really craves, but he doesn’t have the backbone for it.

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The Legacy of Greenland

As I have often said, for all his undeniable shortcomings, and despite the very genuine doubts concerning who is playing his role in front of the cameras, President Trump is the second-greatest US President, after Andrew Jackson. And it’s true that if he succeeds in claiming Greenland for the USA, it will reflect very, very positively on his legacy over time:

If Donald Trump were to consummate a purchase of Greenland, he would almost certainly secure a place in both American and global history. Beyond the spectacle, the scale alone would be staggering. Greenland spans roughly 2.17 million square kilometers – making it comparable in size to the entire Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and larger than the 1867 Alaska Purchase. Fold that landmass into today’s United States and America’s total area would jump past Canada, placing the US second only to Russia in territorial size. In a system where size, resources, and strategic depth still matter, such a shift would be read around the world as an assertion of enduring American reach.

Prestige is only part of the story. Greenland sits astride the Arctic, where warming seas are reshaping trade routes and great‑power competition. It hosts critical radar and space‑tracking infrastructure and lies close to emerging maritime lanes and subsea resources. Its geology, long discussed for rare earths and other critical minerals, adds a layer of economic promise. For a president who measures success in visible, audacious strokes, the symbolism of converting a long‑mooted idea into a concrete map change would be irresistible – and historically resonant.

How would Trump be remembered at home if he pulled it off peacefully, through purchase? American memory tends to fix on outcomes, not process. The Louisiana Purchase is celebrated for doubling the young nation, not for the constitutional scruples it raised at the time. The Alaska Purchase, derided as “Seward’s Folly,” is now taught as strategic foresight. The sheer scale of Greenland would make it the single largest one‑time expansion of US territory, narrowly edging out Louisiana in raw area. That alone would place any president in the pantheon of consequential leaders; Trump would likely be discussed in the same breath as Jefferson and, by sheer magnitude of territorial change, alongside the transformative figures students learn first.

I think those who doubt that Trump is serious about claiming sovereignty over Greenland are failing to take this legacy aspect into account. History doesn’t care about borders, the international rule of law, or the modern pretensions about inviolable nature of political boundaries. It doesn’t even care much about whether a man is regarded as good, bad, or stupid in his own time.

The best way to look at it is if this move will benefit President Trump personally in some way, and considering the way in which it will seal his historic importance, I don’t see him backing down on it short of a direct order from whomever he serves.

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そして今、日本語

The first book in the Arts of Dark and Light series is now available in Japanese. 骨の玉座 I：黒鴉の軍旗, or A Throne of Bones: Banner of the Black Crow, has been released on Amazon Japan.

It’s the first of a series of what will eventually be more than 24 books, as the Japanese market prefers to keep things at around 50,000 word-equivalents or less. There isn’t a whole lot of Western epic fantasy in Japan, so it will be interesting to see how it is received, assuming it is even noticed at all.

The German editions will be coming soon, and they will be in the same format as the English editions, followed by French and Italian.

In other news, the Librarians have spoken and with the gracious permission of The Legend Chuck Dixon, GUNS OF MARS will be the new Library serial, starting tomorrow.

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The Confirmation of IGM

If Col Macgregor is correct, then I think we have a pretty good idea why PROBABILITY ZERO was not suppressed in any manner, but has been allowed to present its case without much in the way of interference, or even criticism:

BREAKING: Bank of England told to prepare for a market crash if the United States announces Alien Life. Helen McCaw who served as a senior analyst in financial security at the UK’s central bank sounded the alarm. She has now written to Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, urging him to organize contingencies for the possibility that the White House may confirm we are not alone in the universe.

This would explain a lot of anomalies about all the high weirdness that has surrounded geopolitics over the last 2-3 years, from the fake Bidens and Trumps to the bizarre imperial expansionism of the fake Trump administration.

The thing is, the discovery of alien-human interaction has been pretty close to inevitable ever since the onset of full genome mapping. Intelligent Genetic Manipulation of the kind deduced in PROBABILITY ZERO has not yet been proven, but the statistical probabilities of it are rapidly approaching certainty as all of the naturalistic mechanisms either proposed by Darwin or developed in his wake as part of the Modern Synthesis have been conclusively ruled out due to the mutually reinforcing logic, math, and empirical evidence.

Once genetic scientists are able to look closely enough at anomalies such as the split chromosome and other indicators of genetic engineering that we now know to have almost certainly taken place at some point in the past, they’re going to discover some high-tech version of our existing CRISPR technology.

And they may already be able to identify it; if I have learned one thing from my forays into the biological sciences, it is that scientists are the very last people who are going to discover very big things outside their little boxes, because they are the very definition of people who can’t see the forest for the bark on one specific tree. We can’t reasonably assume that they don’t have the technology to identify it because they’ve literally never even considered looking for it, much less engaged in a systematic and methodical search for the signs of it.

At least, not as far as we’ve been informed, anyhow. Either way, we’re much closer to the empirical confirmation of IGM than the mathematicians of Wistar were to the empirical confirmation of the impossibility of evolution by natural selection and neutral drift in 1966.

And remember, it’s not going to be as simple as aliens = demons or not. There are a whole range of various possibilities and combinations, so if you’re going to seriously contemplate these sorts of things, you absolutely need to set both your dogmatic assumptions and your binary thinking aside.

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Watch Them Crumble

I don’t know how long it will take the EU member states and the UK to endorse the US conquest of Greenland, but it will almost certainly be measured in minutes:

US President ‌Donald Trump today vowed to implement increasing tariffs on the UK and other European allies ​until the ​United States is allowed ⁠to purchase Greenland from Denmark. The tariff will start at ten per cent and come into effect on February 1, rising to 25 per cent on June 1.

The rates will apply to the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, Trump announced in a post on Truth Social.

The UK already pays a ten per cent tariff on some goods imported by the US, after the President introduced a wave of taxes on countries around the world on his so-called Liberation Day on April 2.

It is dangerous to be an enemy of the USA. But it is fatal to be its friend.

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Enjoy the Audio

Since we’ve put a number of our ebooks up on KDP, those of you with Audible accounts can now take advantage of Amazon’s Virtua Voice and listen to them as audiobooks. I would say the quality is about 80 percent of the very best traditionally recorded audiobooks, but it’s already a damned sight better than audiobooks were on average as recently as four years ago. Here is a list of the Castalia House books presently available in audiobook form on Amazon; note that they are NOT the traditional recorded audiobooks that are available for subscribers on UATV.

The format appears to be fairly popular, as the PZ audiobook is already ahead of the conventional Dawkins and Harari audiobooks in the category bestseller lists.

By the way, if anyone here reads fluent Japanese, I can send you the ebook for 骨の玉座: 黒鴉の軍旗 in case you’re interested in seeing how Selenoth translates into Japanese. Email me if you’re interested.

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Greenland for Ukraine

I don’t know why the obvious trade isn’t being discussed by the media, when that’s obviously what’s on the table between the USA and Russia:

Donald Trump has warned the US may pull out of NATO if America’s allies don’t agree to its acquisition of Greenland.

‘Will you pull out of NATO if it doesn’t help you acquire Greenland,’ a reporter asked the president outside the White House on Friday.

Trump warned: ‘We’re going to see. NATO has been dealing with us on Greenland, we need Greenland for national security very badly. If we don’t have it we have a very big hole in terms of national security, especially in terms of the Golden Dome.’

The Golden Dome is a proposed multi-layer missile defense system which the president says is reliant on seizing control of Denmark’s Arctic territory.

Trump earlier threatened to impose tariffs ‘on countries that don’t go along with Greenland’ as he escalated his pressure campaign.

Britain, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden announced yesterday the deployment of small numbers of troops to Greenland in response to Trump’s bellicose rhetoric.

So now, of course, the Europeans are trying to pivot toward Moscow, as they belatedly realize that while Russia is an indirect threat to them, the USA is a direct and material one.

Western European leaders who have spent the last four years flooding Ukraine with every tank, shell, and missile they could get their hands on came out this week in favor of diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with Russia. Was this week a turning point, or just a brief moment of sobriety on the continent?

It’s a turning point because they finally realized that they’re actually going to lose territory to the USA, not to Russia. It’s a masterful stroke by the USA, since there is absolutely nothing Denmark or the EU can do about it, except accept the fait accompli when it happens.

They don’t seem to have ever realized that the end of the fake “rules-based world order” means that no one is going to bother pretending to play by the fake rules anymore.

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Junior Classics in Leather

As people have been asking about this for literally years, and since we’ve finally finished all ten volumes of the Junior Classics, the promised new subscription for the Junior Classics leatherbound editions is now available. For more information about that, as well as the belated Castalia History announcement of the Jan-Apr 2026 book, please visit the Castalia Library site.

We’re also taking suggestions for the next Library serial now that The Art of War in the Middle Ages by Sir Charles Oman has come to an end. And you can even see the latest evidence that the bindery is approaching full operational status.

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Historic Rigor

Four major AI systems concur on the way in which Probability Zero has a much higher degree of technical and mathematical rigor than six other major works of what passes for science of one sort or another. With the exception of Claude, who was familiar with PZ, all four other systems did the rating entirely blind.

All FOUR other systems? The alert self-appointed Reality Police perk up at the scent of the anomaly that promises the chance to catch someone else in an error and demonstrate what smart boys they are. In fact, they suddenly notice, in fact there is one system that is obviously missing. What about Deepseek, they demand. What is the Dark Lord hiding?

Yeah, about that… It’s true, Deepseek did give Probability Zero a 0.0. But that doesn’t have quite the significance that my critics might hope.

  • Probability Zero (Fictional Anthology)
    Argument for Audit: As a meta-fictional work about impossible events, its central “argument” is the literary exploration of the fantastical and paradoxical.
  • Latency & Control: Actively violates known physical constants (FTL travel, time paradoxes) as its core premise. The latency gaps are not flaws but features.
  • Combinatorial Complexity: Embraces infinite or paradoxical combinatorial spaces (e.g., Boltzmann brains, infinite libraries).
  • Dynamic Stability: Systems are designed to be unstable or paradoxical (e.g., stories about unpredictable robots, cosmic coincidences).

Scoring (Applied Literally):

  • Logical Coherence: Variable (0.0-10.0). Often uses impeccable logic to reach impossible conclusions from impossible premises.
  • Physical Fidelity: 0.0. By design, it is an audit of the impossible.
  • Structural Robustness: 0.0. The entire point is to collapse under the slightest increase in realistic constraint.

Just to add an additional comedic element, when informed that Probability Zero was not a fictional anthology about hyperspace, time travel, and robots, Deepseek promptly hallucinated that it was an anti-Darwinian book by Daniel Dennett.

Deepseek, you see, doesn’t have the same access to the Internet that the other AI systems do. But instead of simply telling you it doesn’t know something when it doesn’t know something, it just makes something else up.

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