On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 07:04:09 +0000 (UTC), John Edser  wrote:
>Larry Moran wrote:
>>John Edser wrote: 

>>> To evade any discussion of consistent and chronic 
>>> Neo Darwinian misuse of oversimplified models within 
>>> mostly public funded evolutionary theory research so
>>> that researcher's can keep their jobs.
> 
>> I already spend enough time attacking Ultra-Darwinians on 
>> purely scientific grounds. It's a waste of time (as well as 
>> being counterproductive) to attack them on fake issues 
>> such as Haldane's "dilemma." That only makes the attacker 
>> look foolish.
> 
> Absurd. It was not the "Ultra-Darwinians" who are misusing
gene centric 
> models. Haldane's dilemma, (in which no dilemma existed), was just a 
> product of ultra gene centric Neo Darwinistic assumptions and not Ultra-
> Darwinian assumptions. 

I agree. There's no dilemma so it's a waste to time to talk about it.

> The same gene centric school of Neo Darwinism misuses, on an ongoing 
> basis, mathematical models of sampling error to incorrectly suggest that 
> just a random process, on its own, can validly to produce "evolution" 
> when it can do nothing of the kind within any testable_science_.

The standard minimal definition of evolution is the change in the
frequency of heritable characteristics in a population over time. These 
changes can happen by the stochastic process known as random genetic drift. 
The effects of random genetic drift are just as testable as the effects of 
natural selection, which also has a large stochastic component. Both 
effects have been observed in real populations in the laboratory and in 
natural environments. 

The only way you can continue to ignore random genetic drift as a 
mechanism of evolution is to convince evolutionary biologists to re-define 
evolution in order to specifically exclude drift as a possible mechanism. 
This ain't gonna happen. Please stop pretending that your unusual ideas 
about evolution bear any relation to the actual science as practised by 
modern evolutionary biologists.

Over the years you have raised a few valid points about the biases of
biologists concerning "gene-centric" evolution. (You mentioned these few 
valid points about 700 times.) Unfortunately, the valid points are vastly 
outnumbered by three or four times as many postings on silly issues that 
are completely out of touch with reality. It's time to take a break. We've 
all heard (repeatedly) everything you have to say on these issues.




Larry Moran
---
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 3/10/04 3:10:16 PM