Re: Haldane's Dilemma
From: Perplexed in Peoria (jimmenegay_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 01/27/05
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Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:50:34 -0500 (EST)
"IThinkSo" <science@minn.net> wrote in message news:ctb5ke$p2c$1@darwin.ediacara.org...
> [moderator's note: Some of my long-time readers will remember Mr.
> ReMine from years past; he's back with more discussion related to
> Haldane's Dilemma (as distinct from "Haldane's Pub Rule"). I would
> urge interested readers to comment, but I'm going to insist on
> maintaining a cordial tone: this not talk.origins. Gratuitous
> insults are not welcome. - JAH]
>
> Haldane's Dilemma is an important evolutionary problem, because it
> places a serious limit on the number of beneficial mutations that can
> be substituted into a population in the available time.
Agreed. Though the severity of the problem depends upon how
many beneficial mutations are believed to be "needed". I personally
doubt that it provides any challenge at all to the heart of
Darwin's theory - common descent and NS as the source of adaptation.
However, it does provide an important constraint on the
"Adaptationist Program" - the notion that current adaptation
should be expected to be near-optimal. Perhaps THE most important
constraint on that notion. For that reason, I think I agree with
you that Haldane's Dilemma deserves more attention.
> Haldane's Dilemma was never actually solved, rather it was confused
> into oblivion and prematurely brushed aside as "solved."
G. C. Williams puts it more charitably. He wrote: "In my opinion,
the problem was never solved, by Wallace or anyone else.
It merely faded away because people got interested in other things."
[Natural Selection - Domains, Levels, and Challenges - 1992]
> Most of that
> confusion occurs over the problem's central concept -- the cost of
> substitution. For over a decade I have advanced that point, along with
> a clearer view of the cost of substitution. As many of you know, my
> cost concept has been ridiculed and denied widely on the Internet, even
> on the evolutionary biology newsgroup, sci.bio.evolution, where I
> discussed the matter with such opponents as Prof. Joe Felsenstein.
> This is easily verified with Internet search-engines.
>
> To remedy the situation, I submitted a technical paper to the
> mainstream science journals, where it has been under review for over
> two years. My paper clarifies the cost of substitution, eliminates
> various confusion factors, and shows that many so-called "solutions" to
> Haldane's Dilemma are false. For example, my paper refutes the very
> common notion (advanced by Joe Felsenstein and many others) that the
> cost of substitution is "zero," and various notions that the
> "environment" or "soft selection" reduce the cost of substitution and
> solve Haldane's Dilemma. You can easily verify that those are still
> commonly promoted as "solutions" to Haldane's Dilemma. To put it
> mildly, my paper runs contrary to the prevailing winds.
I also am somewhat skeptical of Felsenstein's logic on this point.
I would be happy to see a more thoughtful review of it than is
possible within an NG.
> In a recently completed review (at the journal, Theoretical Population
> Biology), my paper was rejected for an astonishing reason. Reviewers
> Warren Ewens and James Crow (two renowned authorities in population
> genetics) acknowledged my paper is CORRECT, which will come as a
> surprise to many of you. But they rejected my paper for one, and only
> one, central reason -- they claimed it is "not new" and was known at
> least "twenty years ago" and therefore a clarification (such as my
> paper) is not needed.
>
> In other words, the field is now caught in a contradiction. Put
> bluntly: Errors and confusion prevail in the literature and on the
> Internet, while a refutation of those is rejected on the grounds that a
> clarification is not needed.
>
> For more details on this interesting story, see
> http://www1.minn.net/~science/a_tale_of_peer-review.htm
I looked at that web site, but I couldn't find a further link to
the draft paper itself. While there is a lot of interest in this
NG regarding "the sociology of science", there is also at least
a little interest regarding science itself. So while your tale
of how you got a raw deal is fascinating, I, for one, am more
interested in your model - your way of looking at the problem
in such a way that Felsenstein's error is made manifest.
[moderator's note: Walter points out that journals typically refuse
papers if they are not the first publisher, and so he's leery of
putting it on the web, where it might be considered to be "published",
especially by editors who want to get shet of it in the first place.
This seems reasonable to me. - JAH]
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