Natura Facit Saltum

Preface to The Frozen Gene: The End of Human Evolution

This is the preface for a new book by Vox Day entitled The Frozen Gene: The End of Human Evolution (Day 2026a). In it, and a prequel Probability Zero (Day 2026b), Day argues from known statistics on the rate of evolutionary change, and the known differences between different but related species—such as humans and chimpanzees—that the differences between species could not possibly be the result of random mutations and environmental selection alone. And yet the dominant paradigm in evolutionary biology remains that evolution is due to random mutations interacting with environmental selection.

As someone who knows all too well that a false paradigm can persist despite monumental evidence against it (Keen 2011, 2021), Vox asked me to write the preface to this book. I accepted his request, not only because I understand how difficult it is to supplant a false paradigm, but also because, as it happens, evolutionary dynamics has been a side interest of mine for decades. Because of that interest, I encountered research on evolution which contradicted “The Blind Watchmaker” argument as long as 40 years ago. I found that research compelling at the time, but was not aware that it had been effectively ignored by the discipline of evolutionary biology.

Preface to The Frozen Gene

Evolution is a fact, as attested by the fossil record, and modern DNA research. The assertion that evolution is the product of a random process is a hypothesis, which has proven inadequate, but which continues to be the dominant paradigm promulgated by prominent evolutionary theorists (Dawkins 1976).

The reason it fails, as Vox Day and Claude Athos show in this book, is time. The time that it would take for a truly random mutation process, subject only to environmental selection of those random mutations, to generate and lock in mutations that are manifest in the evolutionary complexity we see about us today, is orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe, let alone the age of the Earth. The gap between the hypothesis and reality is unthinkably vast.

Since the evidence we see cannot be generated by a random process, then in some sense, evolution must be directed.

One explanation which has become popular is that our reality itself is a simulation generated by a higher intelligence than our own, but that only puts the dilemma one step further back. Unless we succumb to a theory of a divine and eternal creator—which is what Darwin’s theory supplanted—we still have to explain how the creator of our simulation itself evolved.

An answer to the puzzle may lie in research which asserts that evolution itself is inherent to quantum mechanics, which in turn is inherent to the Universe, and that evolutionary change therefore defies Darwin’s oft-repeated premise that “Natura non facit saltum” (Darwin 1859, pp. 173, 183, 188, 215, 400 & 409):

On the theory of natural selection, we can clearly understand why she should not; for natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps. (Darwin 1859, p. 174)

At least two independent experimental research programs in genetics provide evidence that Nature does in fact make leaps:

• Reginald M Gorczynski and E. J. Steele (1980). “Inheritance of acquired immunological tolerance to foreign histocompatibility antigens in mice.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 77: 2871–2875 .

• Cairns, J., J. Overbaugh and S. Miller (1988). “The origin of mutants.” Nature 335(6186): 142-145; (Cairns, Overbaugh, and Miller 1988).

• Steele, E. J., R. A. Lindley and R. V. Blanden (1999). Lamarck’s Signature: How retrogenes are changing the natural selection paradigm, Hachette Book Group.

These research programs found that measured the rate of evolutionary change was greater when the organisms were under evolutionary stress than when they were not. Living entities somehow have the ability to accelerate their evolution.

These researchers hypothesised Lamarckian mechanisms in which “somatic genes (normal or mutated) enter the germ line” (Reginald M Gorczynski and Steele 1980) to explain this phenomenon, but for this to be the case, there must also be a process taking place in DNA that accelerates beneficial mutations. Johnjoe McFadden argues in Quantum evolution (McFadden 2001) that this is quantum computation in the sections of the genome that code for no proteins—segments called “introns”.

This argument is based on the insight that the genetic code itself is quantum-mechanical. The chemical bonds between the four amino acids in DNA—Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine—are quantum phenomena:

the coding properties of DNA are due to the hydrogen bonding between protons and electrons in the DNA bases: the position of these particles determines which hydrogen bonds can form and thereby the base-pairing underlying the genetic code. Protons and electrons are fundamental particles, and their position is subject to quantum mechanics. The genetic code thus becomes a quantum code. (McFadden 2001pp. 65-66)

This in turn means that the pairing of A with T and C with G is not a rigid classical bond, but one subject to the phenomenon of quantum uncertainty. Therefore, mutations are inherent to DNA, and not solely dependent upon cosmic rays and other exogenous factors:

DNA bases can pair with the incorrect base: A can pair with G and T with C (rather than A with T and C with G). Watson and Crick proposed that if, during DNA replication, either the template DNA base or the incoming base is in the tautomeric form, then the wrong base may be inserted into the new strand, resulting in a mutation. (McFadden 2001, p. 66)

Cells have error correction mechanisms, but these are again quantum processes:

DNA replication machinery has proofreading enzymes able to recognize incorrectly inserted bases and clip them out of the growing strand. The inclusion of proof-reading into the system vastly reduces the error rate to only about one wrong base for every billion correct bases. Those errors that escape the correction machinery are the source of naturally occurring mutations; and their source is quantum-mechanical. (McFadden 2001, p. 66)

McFadden then hypothesized that the quantum nature of DNA extends to enabling quantum computing in the sections of DNA which do not code for no protein—known as introns. Since these sections of DNA are not needed for the organism itself, they can undergo rapid alteration under environmental stresses, and use quantum superposition to effectively compute and create responses to that evolutionary stress:

Scientists are aiming … to construct quantum computers capable of executing massively parallel computation as a quantum superposition. This concept is analogous in many ways to quantum evolution, where living systems explore all possible interactions with their environment as a quantum superposition. No quantum computer has yet been constructed by man but life may have discovered quantum computation more than three and a half billion years ago. (McFadden 2001pp. 239-240)

These quantum-computed mutations are manifest in the development of new segments of coding-DNA which can cause, not merely incremental changes in the organism, but species-defining changes, according to two further hypotheses from Jesse Schwartz. In Sudden Origins (Schwartz 2000), Schwartz argues that “homeobox genes” and recessive genes enable rapid speciation.

Recessive genes have been known about ever since Mendel’s original experiments. The fact that they do not manifest in the phenotype enables a mutation to spread through a population unseen until such time as mating produces offspring with only the recessive gene:

Even if there is only one dominant allele in the offspring’s pair, the offspring will still possess the morphology dictated by that allele. Only when an individual inherits two recessive alleles will it develop the feature these gene states represent. Given the behavior of dominant and recessive alleles, a recessive allele can be passed on for generations, spreading throughout the population, without ever being expressed. (Schwartz 2000, p. 6)

Homeobox genes are a more recent discovery: they are genes that cause other genes to fire. They are responsible for the structure of multicellular organisms, and these, rather than the sheer number of genes, are responsible for the diversity of life forms:

It is mind-boggling to realize that, for all intents and purposes, many differences between a fruit fly and a human may lie pretty much in where and when certain homeobox genes are activated. To be sure, there are some other differences between a fruit fly and a human at the molecular level. But, fundamentally, the main difference between organisms lies in alterations in development that result from differences in the timing of homeobox gene activity. (Schwartz 2000, p. 13)

Homeobox genes also make evolutionary change a sudden rather than a gradual affair, because of the cascade of phenotypic changes their firing can generate. The first animals to have fingers had not two, but more than a dozen, and this transition can occur in a single generation. A single mutation to a Homeobox gene can spread through recessive genes in a population until such time as two organisms with this recessive gene mate. This gives rise to progeny with multiple fingers where, not only in their lineage but also in their parents, there were none:

a new species would arise, not through the gradual accumulation of minor variations but through the sudden appearance of a major genetic and morphological reorganization. (Schwartz 2000, p. 371)

The suddenness with which these morphological changes manifest itself gives rise to a mechanism which isolates the new morphology into a new species. The racism that afflicts human societies today may be a distant echo of this process of shunning those who are different, so that new species arise. Speciation occurs, not when a genetic modification spreads through all of an existing population, but when the sudden change it causes makes the new phenotype an outcast from its birth species.

There are, therefore, sound evolutionary arguments already that, in contrast to Darwin’s dictum, nature does make leaps. The remaining question is whether the scientific discipline of evolutionary biology can make the intellectual leap to abandon the “Blind Watchmaker” paradigm.

The experimental results and interpretations of them that I outline here are not new: I first read these works when researching evolutionary programming while undertaking my PhD in economics in the 1990s, and following up on it in the early 2000s. And yet it appears that this research has not altered the dominant paradigm in mainstream evolutionary biology. The savage demolition that Day and Athos undertake in this book of the statistical implications of the “Blind Watchmaker” hypothesis will, I hope, finally push evolutionary biologists to abandon the random mutation hypothesis and accept that Nature does in fact make leaps.

If the human genome is indeed frozen, as this book asserts, then this is not merely a scholastic debate, but one with profound consequences for the future of the human race, and of the knowledge we have accumulated in the last quarter millennium. To survive the other threats that humanity faces, from global warming to nuclear annihilation, and yet succumb to evolutionary extinction, would be the worst of Pyrrhic victories.

References

Cairns, J., J. Overbaugh, and S. Miller. 1988. ‘The origin of mutants’, Nature, 335: 142–5.

Darwin, Charles. 1859. On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, or the Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life.

Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The selfish gene / Richard Dawkins (Oxford University Press: Oxford).

Day, Vox. 2026a. The Frozen Gene: The End of Human Evolution (Castalia House: Switzerland).

———. 2026b. Probability Zero: The Mathematical Impossibility of Evolution by Natural Selection (Castalia House: Switzerland).

Keen, Steve. 2011. Debunking economics: The naked emperor dethroned? (Zed Books: London).

———. 2021. The New Economics: A Manifesto (Polity Press: Cambridge, UK).

McFadden, Johnjoe. 2001. Quantum evolution: How Physics’ Weirdest Theory Explains Life’s Biggest Mystery (W.W. Norton: New York).

Reginald M Gorczynski, and Edward J Steele. 1980. ‘Inheritance of acquired immunological tolerance to foreign histocompatibility antigens in mice’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 77: 2871–75.

Schwartz, Jeffrey H. 2000. Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (Wiley: New York).