Re: Haldane's Dilemma - clarifications - and Felsenstein

Perplexed in Peoria wrote:
....
I did endorse the notion that Walter's paper
is "correct"

Thanks!

I believe this is a fair summary of what is wrong
with ReMine's paper. It is too polemical in style.

My published paper incorporated *all* the useful recommendations from
fourteen editors/peer-reviewers. Most of them from three evolutionary
journals. But also included various creationist editors, such as Paul
Nelson, known for a gracious pleasant style. Even with Felsenstein's
review in their hands, they could not make sense of Felsenstein's
venomous comments (for which he cited no examples).

[moderator's note: Just to be clear, Walter, when you say "my
published paper", are you referring to the paper reviewed by
Felsenstein et al and ultimately rejected? Or did you publish
in some journal and I'm just not aware of it? I ask, because
if there's some other paper out there we should be reading,
we should know where it is. - JAH]

This subject has been garbled since 1957 (by some brilliant minds too).
Therefore, kindly grant some latitude to emphasize necessary points of
clarification. To the amateur (unfamiliar with the prior literature),
or to those authorities embracing the confusions, or to people who just
don't like outsiders in their midst -- such points of emphasis can be
mistaken as "polemical", when they are not. They are merely
clarifications, and are given the proper emphasis due them after all
these years. Crow and Ewens, for example, saw my paper as correct, and
made no complaint that it was polemical.

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.

There are MANY confusion factors concerning the cost of substitution.
And those are COMBINED TOGETHER in innumerable ways. Each researcher
incorporates his own unique blend of confusion factors. It would take
several chapters of a book to give a full diagnosis of each author's
approach. But my paper does not even pretend to be a full diagnosis of
each author's individual blend of confusions, nor is it a historical
treatment of the subject (or who said what, when). My paper is plenty
long enough without those side issues that are unnecessary for my
paper's stated purpose. Rather, my paper is what it claims to be -- a
clarification of the cost concept. My paper identifies the fundamental
CONFUSION FACTORS, shows why they are bad, and eliminates them.

-- Walter ReMine
Haldane's Dilemma
http://SaintPaulScience.com/Haldane.htm


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