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No extant and healthy sexual species averages one child per generation, which is what it would take to make an honest man of g3k. (One child for every two adults doesn't get it done.)

I took it to mean per offspring when I first read it, rather than per generation, so I'm unsympathetic to your point.

I missed the earlier argument, however.

Anyway, following this thinking would lead to an argument over semantics rather than a discussion of the liklihood of the mutation causing a new family of creatures.

You're giving him a license to make ridiculous claims. The lurker is clearly supposed to understand that "the tremendous 50% chance of its [the new gene's] not being reproduced" means just what it says. (That is, a new, neutral mutation has a 50 percent total chance of surviving one lousy generation.)

IOW, gore is openly, brazenly, after countless corrections, lying to the lurkers. You have the choice of correcting him on thread after thread or just letting him snare who he can.

Then there's the matter that he's never wrong about any anything on which an evo is right. Even if the planets have to be in wildly elliptical orbits and the DNA evidence has to show that hippos are utterly unrelated to whales and 1⁷²⁰ has to mean something other than 1. OK, he confessed on that last one, or hinted in that direction a little bit, after maybe a week.