Replies

Blah, blah, blah. A'hem. Mischaracterizing, combined with your selective quoting out of context is misquoting.

Actually, no, but I won't quibble about the difference between misquoting and mischaracterizing. Neither you nor ReMine have substantiated any mischaracterizations that I noticed. You in particular have swiftly alleged such almost any time anyone has quoted ReMine on this thread, but only "substantiated" your claim by grabbing a much bigger block of his nonsense, pasting it inline, and proclaiming "See!??" You have thus far resisted all requests to explain where anyone has actually mischaracterized ReMine's words.

Your latest two posts do not help you in any way that I can see, except for introducing some new material not quoted from previously. I suppose if we quote any of that, we will get the same nonsense from you again. I can only forge ahead anyway.

I notice your strategy mirrors what ReMine did in the debates. He squealed like a stuck pig every time Thomas quoted him in any way on anything. This looks rather bad, especially since he never explained in any intelligible way what Thomas was saying wrong. Thomas appeared to have ample justification for his interpretations.

This looks more to me like ReMine refusing to be pinned down, behavior of a piece with his refusal to answer whether he believes humans and chimps share a geologically recent (5-7 mya) common ancestor.

This does not require rocket science to see that you have failed of your burden of proof. It means the probability of likely sustainable mutuations...leading to anything like any such 'evolutionary change' drops exponentially.

Actually, no. Mutations happen to complex vertebrates in their germ line cells pretty much just as happens to bacteria in petri dishes. It just takes vertebrates longer to have real generations of genetically distinct individuals. Thus they evolve quite slowly compared to bacteria, or even cockroaches. One must not confuse issues of the number of generations and the duration of generations, however. Remine has lashed himself to a fixed 300 generations per substitution, a figure likely to give "results which are wildly out."

So that means Remine was more right than Thomas, and your attempted dodge fails.

No, and I am not the one dodging here. Thomas presented an experimentally verified fact which in the last decade has become crucial to our understanding of how genomes work. You don't wave that away with a pioneering but tentative mathematical model from 1957 which was basically immediately recognized as having problems against observed reality.

Your ten-year old runs up to you saying, "Daddy! Daddy! My teacher says you can't add up a column of even numbers and get an odd number, but I did it just now while doing my homework!" You shake your head and say, "I don't know where you went wrong, but there's a mistake in there."

You and ReMine say it's a conspiracy that science didn't immediately announce in 1957 that Darwin was busted, it's all over, etc. No. We just already knew it couldn't be right that large, complex multicellulars should evolve incredibly slowly, slower for instance than asexuals. Some people bothered to look for what Haldane had wrong, but not too many. Obviously, he had something wrong so everybody hasn't rushed off to figure it out.

Here's an example. From 29+ Independent Lines of Evidence for Macroevolution, a sample from one line:

Figure 1.4.4. Fossil hominid skulls. (Images © 2000 Smithsonian Institution.) (larger 76K JPG version)

(A) Pan troglodytes, chimpanzee, modern
(B) Australopithecus africanus, STS 5, 2.6 My
(C) Australopithecus africanus, STS 71, 2.5 My
(D) Homo habilis, KNM-ER 1813, 1.9 My
(E) Homo habilis, OH24, 1.8 My
(F) Homo rudolfensis, KNM-ER 1470, 1.8 My
(G) Homo erectus, Dmanisi cranium D2700, 1.75 My
(H) Homo ergaster (early H. erectus), KNM-ER 3733, 1.75 My
(I) Homo heidelbergensis, "Rhodesia man," 300,000 - 125,000 y
(J) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Ferrassie 1, 70,000 y
(K) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Chappelle-aux-Saints, 60,000 y
(L) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Le Moustier, 45,000 y
(M) Homo sapiens sapiens, Cro-Magnon I, 30,000 y
(N) Homo sapiens sapiens, modern

The other lines of evidence in there are relevant as well. All that speaks to what ReMine wants to make disappear with Haldane's Dilemma.

What Thomas is asserting as right is grounded in hard fact. What everyone who has rejected Haldane's Dilemma, with or without looking for just where Haldane went wrong, has in his favor is hard fact. The model generates predictions against the evidence. When your model doesn't match nature, it isn't nature that has the problem.

Now, despite the obvious nature of what is going on, a few people through the decades have indeed looked at Haldane's model and found glaring errors, as noted. I will deal with Fred Williams's attempt to keep this old, bad model on life support in my next post.

You don't wave that away with a pioneering but tentative mathematical model from 1957 which was basically immediately recognized as having problems against observed reality.

I see that you have asserted supposed fact and tried to defend Thomas's conclusions as being grounded in fact, when in fact they are subject to multiple skeptical interpretations.

It is safe to say your hominid fossil history does not in fact support your model. So you are the one needing to change. Mutational frequency simply cannot support the theory of Natural Selection at all.

Here is Remine's own response to the current state of the Haldane Dillema debate:

Evolutionists attempt the following argument (often on the internet, but seldom if ever in print). They claim Haldane's Dilemma "only applies to the conditions assumed by Haldane." They suggest Haldane's Dilemma is "solved" by breaking one of Haldane's starting assumptions. They say Haldane used an old, unenlightened model from 1957, not a model based on modern knowledge.

Their argument is mistaken, for the following reasons: Haldane used principles, and models of genetics and selection, that remain exceptionally predominant today in evolutionary genetics textbooks.

In addition, Haldane used assumptions that favor evolution. When you 'break' such an assumption, not only do you not solve Haldane's Dilemma, you make the problem worse. Some of Haldane's assumptions were used (as still commonly done today) in order to simplify the math and generalize the results. You cannot solve Haldane's Dilemma by breaking one of these particular assumptions, since that merely complicates the problem without solving it. There is always a cost of substitution, no matter what model is used. Evolutionists must identify a model that actually solves Haldane's Dilemma, while remaining plausible on other grounds. They have not done that.

For example:

Haldane's old model? – Haldane used a multiplicative-fitness model. (Moreover, for the parameters he used, it also approximates an additive-fitness model.) Both of those fitness models are still predominantly used today. Everything in "Haldane's model" is current with today's practice of evolutionary genetics (including Haldane's uses of fitness, fitness models, selection, alleles, genes, dominance, and Mendelian segregation). So if evolutionists throw-out "Haldane's model" they must also throw-out the modern textbooks on evolutionary genetics.

Small selection coefficients? – Haldane assumed selection coefficients approaching zero. This gives the absolute minimum total-cost of substitution in each case. If you break Haldane's assumption, and invoke higher selection coefficients, then the cost increases, resulting in fewer substitutions, and Haldane's Dilemma worsens.

The environmental-change scenario? – Haldane assumed substitutions begin in a peculiar way, via an environmental-change scenario. The scenario operates as follows. Neutral and slightly harmful mutations (though almost always eliminated outright) sometimes drift upwards in frequency, to arrive at moderate frequencies. Then, when the environment changes, one of these neutral or slightly harmful mutations is converted (it is alleged) into a beneficial mutation. This elevated starting frequency is where Haldane begins to tally the total-cost of the substitution. By giving the substitution a free head-start to an elevated frequency, it lowers the total cost of substitution. This cost-reduction is the only impact of the environmental-change scenario that Haldane allowed into his calculations. If you break Haldane's assumption, then it raises the total-cost of substitution, and worsens Haldane's Dilemma.1

Constant population size? – Haldane assumed the population size remains constant throughout a given substitution (though he allowed large varieties of population size, each for a different substitution). That was done partly for mathematical simplification (in the era before computers were readily available to readers). When evolutionists 'break' this assumption, they do not "solve" Haldane's Dilemma. They merely obscure it further. There is always a cost of substitution; it is unavoidable. It is not enough to merely object to Haldane's simplification. Evolutionists must actually s-o-l-v-e Haldane's Dilemma.

Infinite population size? – Evolutionists sometimes claim Haldane assumed an unrealistic "infinite population size." That is untrue. If Haldane had done that, then the total-cost of substitution would always be infinite – when Haldane calculated its average value is 30. So Haldane obviously did not use an infinite population size. Rather, Haldane used something at the other end of the spectrum. To see it, take a haploid species, and suppose there are two independent alleles, A and B (at independently segregating loci), each with a frequency of one per thousand. By random mating, the genotype AB (containing both alleles, A and B) would have a frequency of one per million. But if the population size is only one thousand individuals, then in a given generation, genotype AB cannot actually exist at a frequency of one in a million.

Instead, either that genotype exists as a whole individual, or it does not exist – it either has a frequency of one per thousand, or zero. There is no 'in-between' when dealing with individuals that are quantized into whole-bodies. This difficulty is handled by Haldane, and by virtually all textbooks today, in the same way – by using non-quantized individuals. To greatly simplify the math, and to generalize the results, they allow a genotype to exist at its expected frequency (without having to quantize the genotype into, say, 1000 whole-bodies). Put simply, Haldane assumed non-quantized individuals, not infinite population size. If evolutionists want to throw-out that simplifying assumption, then they would have to throw-out virtually all of today's evolutionary genetics textbooks. And it still would not solve Haldane's Dilemma.

There is nothing in "Haldane's model" that evolutionists can object to, without shooting themselves in the foot. A solution to Haldane's Dilemma (if one exists at all) will require moving beyond the models, assumptions, and techniques commonly employed in evolutionary genetics today.

1 Remine's book shows that if the environmental-change scenario is fully accounted (which Haldane did not do), then it worsens Haldane's Dilemma. In any case, Haldane's handling of the matter unrealistically favored evolution.

Not only do you mischaracterize Remine, and the import and status of discussion of Haldan'es Dillemma, you appear to misrepresent a supposed consensus..., i.e., some sort of geneticist-consensus that supposedly "defeats" Haldane's Dillemma. An illustrative example is the very letter Remine received by the peer-reviewers on the publication board of his paper which updated and clarified the Cost Substitution issues:

At Theoretical Population Biology the four reviewers wrote of Walter Remine's paper:

"I agree with a very large proportion of what ReMine says." (Warren Ewens – His one disagreement was trivial.1)

"The author champions a clearly-defined concept of cost. .... Its straightforward approach to the issue of the cost of evolution may be valuable. .... Some issues raised in the manuscript are definitely interesting." (Alexey Kondrashov)

"The author's main point .... is a good point" (James Crow, in an extremely brief, half page review)

"I strongly recommend this paper be published. I believe it will revitalize discussion/investigation within an area of population biology which has otherwise become bogged down and neglected. I believe the conceptual framework of 'genetic load' has generally led to an unfruitful morass. ReMine offers a fresh perspective on this old problem. Instead of understanding cost/load in terms of "genetic deaths", ReMine forcefully argues that we should understand this issue entirely in terms of required reproductive excess. He shows this not only clarifies the whole problem conceptually, but allows much cleaner and more generalized computations of cost - in a way that is very clearly connected to the real world. This paper has significantly impacted my own understanding of the problem of substitution cost. Even those who may take exception to ReMine's general approach, should benefit from the resulting stimulation of dialog." (Reviewer #4 at Theoretical Population Biology )

COMMENT: The only consensus conclusion (3 of 4) we can therefore draw from the lack of approval for publication appears that TOE advocates appear to fear a serious mathematical critique.

Then in attempting to sidestep the issues, you dig yourself deeper, as accurately anticipated by Remine:

One must not confuse issues of the number of generations and the duration of generations, however. Remine has lashed himself to a fixed 300 generations per substitution, a figure likely to give "results which are wildly out."

Actually, it is your side, which has to believe in either massive change, or 10 generations per substitution...which has the problem of gross instability (belied by species which remain stable across aeons)...which if true is unavoidably implying we should already be dead as a species.