Tim Tyler wrote:
> 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.
> 
The theorem was derived for an infinite population.

> 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.
> 
No, it's a simplifying assumption.  I think to accuse Hardy in 
particular of mathematical ignorance deserves, well, a 
non-mathematician's apology.

> 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.

But it is - in finite populations, you get an excess of homozygotes, as 
any student of population genetics should know.

Bob

-- 
Bob O'Hara

Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
P.O. Box 4 (Yliopistonkatu 5)
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
Telephone: +358-9-191 23743
Mobile: +358 50 599 0540
Fax:  +358-9-191 22 779
WWW:  http://www.RNI.Helsinki.FI/~boh/
Journal of Negative Results - EEB: http://www.jnr-eeb.org
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 6/19/04 10:17:28 PM