Haldane's dilemma was discovered by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane in 1957. It states that in a period of ten million years there could only be about 1,670 beneficial mutations in a population of animals that would be ancestral to humans. This is far too few mutations to produce the thousands of adaptations that make humans distinct from their ape-like precursors. In other words, the mutation rate is too slow for humans to have evolved in the time frames normally allotted by evolutionists.
This has been a serious irritant to Darwinian biologists for forty five years, but recently evolutionary geneticist Leonard Nunney claims to have developed a computer simulation that shows that mutations could have occurred much more rapidly than the Haldane limit permits.
This has been hailed as a breakthrough, but there is a problem. Nunney won't share the program with ID critics so there's no way to confirm whether it does what he says it does. Critics are evidently expected to simply take his word for it.
This is truly astonishing. Science is built on being able to repeat the work of others in order to confirm it, but despite Nunney's intransigence, other scientists are touting his work as being a refutation of the Haldane limit and of those who argue that the limit makes human evolution from any proposed ancestor highly dubious.
One wonders what Nunney could possibly fear about sharing his software, and why his colleagues think that he has made a great leap forward when he won't let that leap be examined. One also wonders whether researchers in any other scientific discipline would give a pass to a colleague who wouldn't share data and methodology.
I doubt it.
RLC
