Re: Haldane's Dilemma - clarifications - and Felsenstein


"Joe Felsenstein" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:e71e14$1b28$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[snip]
I stand by my review as written. I see nothing in Walter's response
that would cause me to change anything in it.
[snip]
If someone here other than Remine (or one other poster to whom I am not
responding for reasons of his past insults) feels that his response to my
review needs discussion, I'll discuss it.

No need for discussion, but since I did endorse the notion that Walter's
paper is "correct", I would like to comment briefly on your review.

This paper is written in a contentious, supercilious, nonacademic style, and
argues that the notion of a "cost of substitution" has been misunderstood and
misapplied by many workers, who have been confused. ...

The paper has the defect that it assumes that all authors have been attempting
to describe the same notion, and that their differences have resulted from
misunderstandings of the correct concept. ...

I believe this is a fair summary of what is wrong with ReMine's paper.
It is too polemical in style. It would benefit if the author had adopted
the stance of a fair reviewer attempting sincerely to understand the
viewpoints of other authors and then seeking to explicate their results
using his own conceptual framework.

[snip]
Remine's treatment is thus inadequate in its historical treatment of others'
work, and is also inadequate internally. Take the idea that susbtitution
requires reproductive excess. Suppose that we have a (haploid) species with
no reproductive excess. Suppose that the environment changes so that all
individuals have 20% less reproduction, except for 10% of them who have a
particular allele, and those continue to barely replace themselves. A little
consideration will show that the substitution will happen, and the population
will end up 90% smaller. But if there is even a slight reproductive excess,
then with enough time the population will ultimately recover its numbers.
There is then no lower limit on the reproductive excess needed.

I haven't read ReMine's response to Felsenstein's review, but I feel that
Felsenstein is being a little unfair here. ReMine's paper addresses this
issue adequately, and I'm sure he pointed this out in his response.

[snip]
I conclude that, although Remine's algebra is correct, his description of how
his work relates to the costs and loads defined by others is seriously wrong.

I'm not an expert on how loads and costs have been defined by others,
but just by reading Walter's paper, I have to say that I formed the strong
suspicion that Walter was not providing a fair review of prior work.


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