Experimental Evidence of 'Taking the Bait'

[Roy (30-year veteran)]

@John_Harshman

In case it’s unclear, Haldane’s Dilemma is all about the number of excess deaths required under Haldane’s model in order to fix a novel mutation by selection. That is, it’s about the cost of selection. (There are of course alternative models of selection, e.g. soft or truncation selection, under which this cost isn’t incurred.) If I recall, he comes up with a maximum of around 3000 selective fixations since separation between humans and chimps, because a population could not sustain a greater reproductive cost without extinction.

IIRC that wasn’t Haldane, that was Walter Remine (ab)using Haldane’s theory. Haldane himself didn’t set such hard limits, and his original paper included an example with a lower cost of fixation (antelopes?)

I can’t check easily from my phone, but again IIRC I wrote this up on the Talk: page for Haldane’s dilemma at CreationWiki, and since no-one there ever bothered with tge Talk: pages it’s probably still there.