pangloss

It has been claimed that there are none of the creation-famous doctoring of quotes in Walter ReMine's 1993 book "The Biotic Message." This claim is supposed to add another layer of 'impenetrability' to ReMine's work. Upon checking up on some of ReMine's claims, I discovered the following misquotation of Leigh Van Valen.

ReMine quotes vanValen thusly:

Van Valen wrote, "I like to think of it (Haldane's dilemma) as a dilemma for the population." (p. 219)

Reading Van Valen's original paper ("Haldane's dilemma, evolutionary rates, and heterosis." The American naturalist. 1963.):

"...but because it necessarily involves either a completely new mutation or (more usually) previous change in the environment or the genome, I like to think of it as a dilemma for the population: for most organisms, rapid turnover in any few genes precludes rapid turnover in the others."

A very long run-on sentence, to be sure (I omitted the introduction of the sentence for brevity).

However, ReMine's quote is in error because as written, ReMine makes it appear that there is no information preceding the statement, and nothing following: The sentence begins well before the point at which ReMine begins his quote, but ReMine does nothing to indicate this. There is no period after 'population' in the original, there is one in ReMine's quote.

ReMine then used his doctored quote to claim that Van Valen 'confuses' the issue and such.
Indeed, this is ReMine's modus operandi. He attempts to establish, from the first few pages of his book on, that apparently only he, Haldane, and maybe Kimura on a good day even understood/understand the 'cost' issue. By propping up this superscientist façade with arrogant, condescending statements throughout his book, and the repeated accusations of ignorance (and collusion) directed toward actual evolutionary biologists and geneticists, ReMine attempts to make his readers believe that everything he writes about the topic is correct and that any attempts at addressing "Haldane's dilemma" by actual research scientists are futile because those authors obviously just don't understand it.
ReMine then 'refutes' a tiny sampling of the papers on the subject by simply dismissing them, claiming as indicated above, that the authors just don't understand the issues or have "confused" them.


This demonstrates the problems of the absolutist position (taken by those that have claimed that ReMine never misquoted anyone) - it makes it that much easier to demolish the whole foundational premise.
A SINGLE example, as presented here, refutes it.

Dr.GH

Good job. This is what I like to read in the morning.

Valentine Pontifex

Pangloss,

You have a copy of ReMine's book?

The Talk.Origins Archive could use a FAQ on that book and Haldane's dilemma.

Hint. Hint. :-)

pangloss

Yet ANOTHER summer project???