Anon.  wrote or quoted:
> Jim McGinn wrote:
> > jason{at}kalavinka.freeserve.co.uk (friend) wrote in message
news:...

> >>Pardon my ignorance, but I have only just discovered this law.

[...]

> > Many of the more popular myths of the current paradigm 
> > of evolutionary biology pivot off a kind of rhetorical 
> > trick.  Specifically the trick involves employing a 
> > word that has more than one meaning in an argument (or 
> > special case) to achieve the illusion of scientific 
> > validity.  This is *all* that's going on with the 
> > Hardy-Weinberg, socalled, Law.  And you hit the nail on 
> > the head with respect to which word is the "pivot" with 
> > respect to how this rhetorical trick is manifested in 
> > Hardy-Weinberg: randomness.  
> 
> Wierd.  The Hardy-Weinberg law is deterimistic: there is no randomness 
> in it.

The Hardy-Weinberg law is normally stated in a form that refers to
a large population where mating is random.

E.g. see: 

  http://library.thinkquest.org/19926/java/tour/06.htm?tqskip1=1

Alas, this page expresses the law in terms of an infinite population :-(

A disasterous error - IMO - since talking about gene frequencies in an 
infinite population is a sign of mathematical ignorance.

Popularisers should make explicit the behaviour is what happens as
the population size tends towards infinity - and not attempt to pass
it off as an effect in an infinite population.
-- 
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