John Edser  wrote or quoted:

> I have described an experiment that can eliminate all
> natural selection within an _expanding_ population 
> only allowing genetic drift as causative to allele
> freq. changes. All you have to do is artificially
> force all members of one population to raise the
> exactly the same number of fertile forms to adulthood
> where this number is larger than just a parental
> replacement value.  The prediction is: all natural 
> selection must be halted within this experiment while 
> Darwinian fitness equality can remain enforced. Thus only 
> genetic drift (which cannot be eliminated) is now left 
> to cause "evolution".

It won't work:

Organisms with fatal or severely deleterious mutations will
still be selected against - as will organisms who don't
manage to produce any fertile offspring - despite the
best efforts of the managers of the experiment.

You can't eliminate selection - all you can do is
change the selection criteria.

> The population will deteriorate to such an
> extent that it will become impossible to enforce
> Darwinian fitness equality and Darwinian selection
> will force its way into that population to
> correct the dissolution caused by drift acting
> alone.

Yes - that sounds about right.

In practice, you can't eliminate selection.
-- 
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