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.
>>
>>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.  
> 
Wierd.  The Hardy-Weinberg law is deterimistic: there is no randomness 
in it.

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 6/18/04 5:22:15 PM