If anyone at all has misquoted ReMine, I don't see it.

Blah, blah, blah. A'hem. Mischaracterizing, combined with your selective quoting out of context is misquoting.

More non-substantive responses by you. Conclusion: You are the "cornered rat." If you can't even quote accurately, then your science fidelity is suspect in the extreme.

Yes, higher vertebrates, slow reproduction. So what?

This does not require rocket science to see that you have failed of your burden of proof. It means the probability of likely sustainable mutuations...leading to anything like any such 'evolutionary change' drops exponentially. So that means Remine was more right than Thomas, and your attempted dodge fails.

Here is a short synopsis of Remines explication of the Haldane Dillemma:

Haldane's Dilemma

Walter Remine, author of "The Biotic Message", notes:

Stephen Gould revealed the "trade secret" of paleontology (that was *his* term): (1) There are large gaps between fossil life forms, and an absence of gradual intergradations. But paleontology has two more trade secrets: (2) There is a systematic absence of identifiable ancestors, lineage and large-scale phylogeny. (3) Problems 1 and 2 cannot plausibly be explained away by an "incomplete" fossil record. Those trade secrets, I say, were the key observational forces behind the theory of punctuated equilibria.

Evolutionary genetics has trade secrets too. The major one is Haldane's Dilemma, a problem discovered in the 1950s by the famous evolutionary geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane. Journals discussed it through the 60s, and ignored it thereafter. Evolutionists never publicly solved it, rather they brushed it aside. Here are my claims:

Haldane's Dilemma is invisible in evolutionary genetics textbooks today, you will be lucky to find information on the problem. The little available information is cryptic and opaque, even to serious students.
The standard model of evolutionary genetics -- prominently displayed in every evolution textbook -- is massively inadequate to solve the problem. Yet evolutionists continue to sell that model because it makes evolution seem easy and inevitable.
Even if I arm you with information about the problem, you will find precious little in evolutionary textbooks that *might* be taken as a plausible solution.
The problem is robust and firm -- the phenomenon can even be demonstrated in computer simulations, such as the same one Dawkins used in his book _The Blind Watchmaker_.

In short, Haldane's Dilemma is a thorough trade secret of evolutionary geneticists.

My book, _The Biotic Message_, has two chapters (and an appendix) detailing Haldane's Dilemma and rebuffing the many attempts to solve it. Here I'll draw from that material to describe the problem, and bring you up to speed. Then I'll answer your questions, and perhaps eventually we'll have our usual rip-snortin' debate. I'll keep my descriptions short and easy reading.

Along the relevant primate line, our supposed pre-human ancestors had an effective generation time of 20 years. (I quote sources and details in my book, so I'll spare you here.) Imagine ten million years ago -- (that is two to three times the age of the alleged chimp-human split) -- that's enough time for 500,000 generations of our presumed ancestors.

Imagine a population of 100,000 of those organisms quietly evolving their way to humanity. For easy visualization, I'll have you imagine a scenario that favors rapid evolution. Imagine evolution happens like this. Every generation, one male and one female receive a beneficial mutation so advantageous that the 999,998 others die off immediately, and the population is then replenished in one generation by the surviving couple. Imagine evolution happens like this, generation after generation, for ten million years. How many beneficial mutations could be substituted at this crashing pace? One per generation -- or 500,000 nucleotides. That's 0.014 percent of the genome. (That is a minuscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees).

That's not a difficult calculation, yet it immediately reveals a problem. Is 500,000 beneficial nucleotides enough to explain the origin of humanity from some chimp-like ancestor?

The problem gets worse. The scenario favored evolution in wildly unrealistic ways. I could name several, but one is simple: There is no possible way for a female primate to produce 100,000 offspring each generation!!! Here's the lesson:

Evolution requires the substitution of old prevalent traits with new rare traits. But the substitution rate is limited by the species' reproductive capacity. If an evolutionary scenario requires an implausibly high level of reproductive capacity, then the scenario is not plausible.

Haldane saw this problem and posed it within the framework of mathematical population genetics. We will discuss his calculations later, but his conclusion was easy to understand. He calculated that the higher vertebrates (such as mammals) have only enough reproductive capacity to sustain an average rate of 300 generations per substitution. The literature seldom states the figure, but when it does, that is the only one offered.

Haldane's Dilemma is glaringly plain. Take the population we discussed above. In ten million years, it could substitute 1,667 beneficial nucleotides. That is less than 50 millionths of one percent of the genome. (And that is *before* we make deductions. For example, Gould says species typically spend *at least* 90% of their time in stasis, where little or no evolution occurs. There are other deductions we'll discuss later, but together they reduce the figure far below 1,667.) Is that enough to explain the origin of upright posture, speech, language, and appreciation of music, to name just a few of our uniquely human capacities? Is 1,667 beneficial nucleotides enough to make a sapien out of a simian?

Haldane's Dilemma is fundamentally simple. Anyone can understand it. Anyone with a pencil can calculate it and see. Computer simulations clearly demonstrate the problem. So evolutionists cannot claim they were unaware. Nonetheless they were cryptic, effectively concealing the problem for nearly forty years. Few people have heard of it, and evolutionary geneticists offer no unified coherent solution. Haldane's Dilemma is a major scandal.

Books:

The Biotic Message - Walter ReMine - The book focuses on the biological issues. It is not about age, geology, cosmology, floods, or catastrophes. It contains no theology or religious discussion. I highly recommend this book. It reveals the illusions that evolutionists use to propagate their dogma. This should be read by creationists as will as evolutionists.Publisher Book Review order from Amazon
Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges by George C. Williams
'Mathematics of Evolution' by Fred Hoyle

Links:

Haldane's Dilemma -
Haldane's Dilemma, and the textbooks
Answering Evolutionist attempts to dismiss Haldane’s Dilemma Fred Williams
Haldane's Dilemma
The Biotic Message : Evolution versus Message Theory
Haldane's Dilemma see also a rebuttal
Haldanes Dilemma
Population Genetics Made Simple David A. Plaisted
A Knighted Astronomer's Fight Against Neo-Darwinism, Using Mathematics As His Weapon. a review of Fred Hoyle's 'Mathematics of Evolution' by Gert Korthof

Footnote:

JBS Haldane, The Cost of Natural Selection, Journal of Genetics 55, pp 511-524 (1957)

Blah, blah, blah. A'hem. Mischaracterizing, combined with your selective quoting out of context is misquoting.

Actually, no, but I won't quibble about the difference between misquoting and mischaracterizing. Neither you nor ReMine have substantiated any mischaracterizations that I noticed. You in particular have swiftly alleged such almost any time anyone has quoted ReMine on this thread, but only "substantiated" your claim by grabbing a much bigger block of his nonsense, pasting it inline, and proclaiming "See!??" You have thus far resisted all requests to explain where anyone has actually mischaracterized ReMine's words.

Your latest two posts do not help you in any way that I can see, except for introducing some new material not quoted from previously. I suppose if we quote any of that, we will get the same nonsense from you again. I can only forge ahead anyway.

I notice your strategy mirrors what ReMine did in the debates. He squealed like a stuck pig every time Thomas quoted him in any way on anything. This looks rather bad, especially since he never explained in any intelligible way what Thomas was saying wrong. Thomas appeared to have ample justification for his interpretations.

This looks more to me like ReMine refusing to be pinned down, behavior of a piece with his refusal to answer whether he believes humans and chimps share a geologically recent (5-7 mya) common ancestor.

Actually, no. Mutations happen to complex vertebrates in their germ line cells pretty much just as happens to bacteria in petri dishes. It just takes vertebrates longer to have real generations of genetically distinct individuals. Thus they evolve quite slowly compared to bacteria, or even cockroaches. One must not confuse issues of the number of generations and the duration of generations, however. Remine has lashed himself to a fixed 300 generations per substitution, a figure likely to give "results which are wildly out."

So that means Remine was more right than Thomas, and your attempted dodge fails.

No, and I am not the one dodging here. Thomas presented an experimentally verified fact which in the last decade has become crucial to our understanding of how genomes work. You don't wave that away with a pioneering but tentative mathematical model from 1957 which was basically immediately recognized as having problems against observed reality.

Your ten-year old runs up to you saying, "Daddy! Daddy! My teacher says you can't add up a column of even numbers and get an odd number, but I did it just now while doing my homework!" You shake your head and say, "I don't know where you went wrong, but there's a mistake in there."

You and ReMine say it's a conspiracy that science didn't immediately announce in 1957 that Darwin was busted, it's all over, etc. No. We just already knew it couldn't be right that large, complex multicellulars should evolve incredibly slowly, slower for instance than asexuals. Some people bothered to look for what Haldane had wrong, but not too many. Obviously, he had something wrong so everybody hasn't rushed off to figure it out.

Here's an example. From 29+ Independent Lines of Evidence for Macroevolution, a sample from one line:

Figure 1.4.4. Fossil hominid skulls. (Images © 2000 Smithsonian Institution.) (larger 76K JPG version)

(A) Pan troglodytes, chimpanzee, modern
(B) Australopithecus africanus, STS 5, 2.6 My
(C) Australopithecus africanus, STS 71, 2.5 My
(D) Homo habilis, KNM-ER 1813, 1.9 My
(E) Homo habilis, OH24, 1.8 My
(F) Homo rudolfensis, KNM-ER 1470, 1.8 My
(G) Homo erectus, Dmanisi cranium D2700, 1.75 My
(H) Homo ergaster (early H. erectus), KNM-ER 3733, 1.75 My
(I) Homo heidelbergensis, "Rhodesia man," 300,000 - 125,000 y
(J) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Ferrassie 1, 70,000 y
(K) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Chappelle-aux-Saints, 60,000 y
(L) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Le Moustier, 45,000 y
(M) Homo sapiens sapiens, Cro-Magnon I, 30,000 y
(N) Homo sapiens sapiens, modern

The other lines of evidence in there are relevant as well. All that speaks to what ReMine wants to make disappear with Haldane's Dilemma.

What Thomas is asserting as right is grounded in hard fact. What everyone who has rejected Haldane's Dilemma, with or without looking for just where Haldane went wrong, has in his favor is hard fact. The model generates predictions against the evidence. When your model doesn't match nature, it isn't nature that has the problem.

Now, despite the obvious nature of what is going on, a few people through the decades have indeed looked at Haldane's model and found glaring errors, as noted. I will deal with Fred Williams's attempt to keep this old, bad model on life support in my next post.