that crazy Walter ReMine....

Now I have heard just about everything...

The clown prince of creationist egomania got called out with his britches down and engaged in one of theshallowest, weaselly maneuvers I have seen from a creationist in a long time.

On T.O., after a post from James Acker (quoting me ) regardign Haldane's dilemma and ReMines lack of citations for papers providing 'solutions' to it, ReMine writes:

"I said MY READERS would be bored by the needless repetition in dissecting all the papers on Haldane's Dilemma. My book
covers the dilemma's concepts and arguments, not 'who said what when'. "

This seems a bit odd for the guy who earlier wrote(and ad nauseum has written):

"I said Haldane's Dilemma was not solved. Instead it was confused, garbled, and prematurely brushed aside."

Hmmm... So can something be "prematurely brushed aside" when, in fact, there were lots of papers on the matter in the literature, AND ReMine simply decided not to cite them. He says that he did not want to 'bore' his poor scientifically illiterate readers. Yet he provides 14 citations in support of a simple explanation of Haldane's model!

Is it just me, or is the stench of deception arising from the clown prince?

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This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 02-26-2005 00:21 AM

It gets better:

ReMine:
Let me use Musgrave's words to make the point:
>
> "Trying to compare the substitution rate
> in a population of [N=100] individuals
> with the substitution rate in a population
> of between 10,000 to 100,000 individuals
> is a pretty big blunder to make"
> (from Musgrave's post, brackets mine,
> N=100 from Dawkins's simulation)

Roy:
But those aren't Musgrave's words. Musgrave writes:

"Trying to compare the appearance rate of beneficial mutations in a
population of 5 individuals with the substitution rate of beneficial
mutations in a population of between 10,000 to 100,000 individuals
is a pretty big blunder to make"

Musgrave's main point was that you had changed the population size in
the simulation from the default of 100 down to 5, possibly through
ignorance of how the program worked, and then commented on the
slow rate of substitution.

Yet in your quote above, you appear to have changed Musgrave's text to
hide this point, and make it appear that he is referring to the default setting in the simulation.

Do you have an explanation?

Roy

I don't know if you're keeping tabs on Walter or not, but he tried getting his "Haldane's Dilemma" paper published in Theoretical Population Biology and got rejected.
In that thread at ARN he takes evolutionists to task for (essentially):

Three stages in the acceptance of a new idea: * First they ridicule it. * Then they deny it. * Then they say they already knew it.

In particular he claims to have made a significant departure from the rest of the field in his understanding of the "dilemma". James Crow and Warren Ewens agreed that his work was correct, but they rejected it on the grounds that it wasn't really anything new.
I happen to work down the hall from Dr. Crow. He knows about my interest in evolution/creation, and he mentioned that he had been contacted by some of the participants in the thread. Dr. Crow was kind enough to write up a response to some of ReMine's claims, and I posted it for him here.

Admittedly, I'm not a pop. geneticist, and I've had some difficulty following the ins and outs of the thread. If anyone has some thoughts or comments I'd be happy to hear them.

I have been following it.

No surprises - ReMine cries persecution and suppression, his followers circle the wagons and suppress dissent and try to change subjects. ReMine and followers cannot even explain that there is a dilemma, but they say over and over that they have done so.

The usual distortions and misdirections.

ReMine is a legend in his own mind.

I've been following it as well. Since we can't get a peek at the paper, I'm taking a look at Remine's comments on Crow (see Remine's website) and going back to his original derivation in the Appendix of The Biotic Message to see if what he is saying has any validity. I'm assuming he hasn't changed the actual derivation much.

Unfortunately, my time is short these days to work on it. I have noticed a curious fact, though: for somebody who complains about confusion, Remine's choice of terms in his initial equation make it very difficult for somebody to keep things straight when comparing his stuff with papers written by population geneticists. For example, he uses the capital letter "S" for population size, when that letter in lower case is almost universally used today as the selection coefficient. Also, he uses "N" as the total number of generations needed for a substitution, when "N" is an almost universal term for population size. In addition, he uses capital "P" and "Q" for the number of individuals with the alleles in question, when "p" and "q" are used by population geneticists for the respective allele frequencies. If Remine's paper uses the same terms, that could make his argument, regardless of its validity, tough sledding indeed.

KC