Haldane's dillema

[Wise Young]

In 1957, evolutionary biologist JSB Haldane published a paper that:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/...es_nondil.html

calculated, based on a series of assumptions, that on average it took about 300 generations for a beneficial allele to go from initial appearance to being present in all members of a population (the allele is “fixed” in the population). This figure was pretty well constant over a range of selection intensities [1]. Anti-evolutionist Walter ReMine has latched onto this paper, claiming that it presents severe problems for evolution. His key claim is that Haldane’s dilemma makes it impossible to fix more than 1,667 beneficial mutations since the last common ancestor of humans and chimps (ReMine, “The Biotic Message”, page 217). ReMine claims that 1,667 beneficial mutations are too few to make a poet-philosopher from an ape, therefore Haldane’s dilemma shows evolution cannot account for humans.

This problem, called Haldane's dilemma is a problem that several scientists have tried ot grapple with. Ian Mugrave on the web site The Panda's thumb gave it a shot to resolve the dilemma.
• The generational time is not the dilemma. Haldane himself points that the number is in the range of know evolution rates.
• However, the dilemma actually a problem because it makes another prediction that Haldane didn't see... that his assumption of the upper limit of allelic variations were true, organisms would be not be able to survive.

Earlier, I had made a calculation concerning how many generations would be required to remove a deleterious allele, even if the allele were fatal to 25% of the members of a population. Evolution is inefficient in this regard. I was trying to find out whether somebody had taken up this problem and found this post by Ian Musgrave. The problem is actually quite complicated. Anyway, for anybody who is interested in delving into a problem like it, this is a good read.