Haldane's Dilemma

This is very interesting. Dembski has teamed up with Walter ReMine, demonstrating once again that the old addage "opposites attract" does not apply to kooks.

ReMine has an article on Uncommon Descent where he pushes his usual whine about evil scientists and how their world-wide conspiracy has kept him from revealing the fatal flaw in evolution [Evolutionist withholds evidence on Haldane’s Dilemma]. I can see how similar this is to Intelligent Design Creationism.

Some of you may not be familiar with the so-called "dilemma" of Haldane. Fortunately, ReMine provides a nice short summary.

For many years I have publicly claimed Haldane’s Dilemma is a major unsolved problem for evolution. A problem so severe it threatens macroevolution as a “fact” and evolutionary genetics as an empirical science. The problem, briefly, is that evolutionary geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane (1957), discovered an important argument that limits the speed of evolution. Under his calculations, an ape-human-like population, given a generous ten million years, could substitute no more than 1,667 beneficial mutations — which, according to evolutionary geneticists, are each typically a single nucleotide. All the human adaptations within that time would have to be explained with this small number of substitutions. For more information, see here: Haldane's Dilemma.

That's it. Fifty years ago J.B.S. Haldane did a quick calculation suggesting that if you make certain assumptions (now shown to be inaccurate) then you could only fix 1,667 beneficial human mutations in 10 million years. Apparently ReMine thinks this is way too little evolving, even if all it has to do is produce the likes of him and Dembski.

We don't need to thrash out why ReMine is wrong. That's been done many times. What's interesting about this is the Wikipedia article that ReMine wrote. Go there right now and take a look because it won't look like that for long now that ReMine has let the cat out of the bag. Oops! It's not on Wikipedia it's on another Wiki called ResearchID.org. My goof—thanks to Torbjörn Larsson for pointing this out. The real Wikipedia article [Haldane's dilemma] is pretty good. So now the only reason for taking note of this is the fact that ReMine is being promoted by Dembski. That's hardly news. Move along. There's nothing to see here.

For all you talk.origins fans, I found a little bit of history when I did the research for this article. Follow this link to a message from Saint Andrew (you know who that is). It's about a 1995 post from Ted Holden (yes, the famous Ted Holden who coined the term "Howler monkeys") defending Walter ReMine. Proving once again that kooks will recognize each other.

The picture of ReMine is from the video of a lecture on his book The Biotic Message. You can only watch a few minutes but that's enough. He does a fine job of spining "framing" his message for an audience of true believers.

[If you mention his name, he will come.]