jason{at}kalavinka.freeserve.co.uk (friend) wrote in message
news:...
> Pardon my ignorance, but I have only just discovered this law.
> 
> Applying it to evolution looks a little to me like applying a rate of
> interest to your bank balance - is there an equivalent to compound
> interest,

(BTW, fitness is only calculable through compound 
interest, which continues long after an organism 
is deceased.)

> without getting too much into specifics.
> 
> It's fairly evident I think that it is unlike extending Newton's laws
> to - say - rigid bodies (where a summation is sufficient) and more
> like at minimum a noisy system with many degrees of freedom.
> 
> The problem I was having with genetic drift was the description of it
> as 'random' when random changes are intermixed with less than random
> changes and selection applying to the overall (but not just summed)
> genome - every generation.
> 
> Maybe there is some magical method by which the random part can be
> extracted after the fact, but that seems unlikely - only a part of the
> result that meets tests for randomness which is likely to be a
> different matter altogether.

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.  

In common usage there are about three different meanings 
for the word random.  When one is careful to explicate 
which of these meanings one actually intends (which can 
be done with definitions and synonyms) the percieved 
validity of Hardy-Weinberg evaporates.

Jim
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