mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== 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: 1) 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. 2) 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. 3) 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. 4) 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.