This post will supply some more technical details of my counterexample to Mark Champneys’ arguments that approach of physical and biological systems to equilibrium prevents natural selection from being effective. The counterexample is explained in my previous post. Below I provide the relevant equations and some simulation results showing what the effect of genetic drift will be. To avoid taking up too much space on the site’s front page, I will put most of that content “below the fold” …

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I heard an interview with Laurie Garrett last night on Democracy Now. Ms. Garrett, a distinguished science journalist and the author of the apparently prescient 1995 book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance, is not quite as optimistic as the stock market regarding Pfizer’s recent announcement of a potentially successful coronavirus vaccine. So I looked up Ms. Garrett’s recent article in Foreign Policy magazine.

Ms. Garrett seems generally pessimistic, because cases are surging, the United States has roughly one-fifth of known cases worldwide, and possibly one-third (!) of the population will probably refuse a vaccine, once one is available. Though optimistic that President-Elect Biden has appointed a Covid task force, she also notes that the present lame-duck administration will be in charge for more than two months and the presidential scientific advisor, Scott Atlas, advocates “what amounts to a do-nothing approach to Covid-19 control” (as we noted here). Ms. Garrett foresees a “mass exodus” of health officials from the government this fall.

What about the vaccine? Ms. Garrett says,

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Photograph by Marilyn Susek.

Photogaphy Contest, Honorable Mention.

Are creationists dictating Covid policy? We just received an article, Far-Right Creationists Are Setting Trump’s Virus Response, by Matthew Sheffield, which suggests precisely that. Mr. Sheffield’s article is posted in Right Wing Watch, a “project” of the progressive organization People For the American Way.

Mr. Sheffield begins by noting that Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, told Jake Tapper of CNN, “We are not going to control the pandemic … because it’s a contagious virus” (does he think we could control it better if it were a non-contagious virus?). Mr. Meadows may or may not be a creationist, but he is certainly a fellow traveler: At one time, he purchased a piece of property on which an Allosaurus specimen had been discovered (supposedly by some home-schooled children). He then sold the property to Answers in Genesis, arguably in order to keep the fossils under the control of young-earth creationists.

The Vice-President, Mike Pence, heads the White House Coronavirus Task Force. On August 8, 2016, Mr. Sheffield reminds us, Mr. Pence said, in a somewhat rambling speech on the floor of the House,

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Our colleague Joshua Swamidass reports on the blog Peaceful Science that he was interviewed yesterday along with Michael Behe. I have not yet had a chance to watch the interview, Michael Behe: Kafka at the Dover trial (actually, I am hoping for a transcript), so I will merely note that Dr. Behe apparently compared the Dover trial to the book The Trial by Franz Kafka. I have read The Trial and also much of the transcript of the Dover trial, and I find that claim astonishing though, as I said, I have not actually seen the interview yet.

At any rate, here is part of what Dr. Swamidass has to say:

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