Size matters, or it doesn't....

Over at my other blog I reaffirm Richard Dawkins' criticism of Freeman Dyson's off the cuff opinions about evolutionary genetics. Dyson is basically asserting that the rate of evolution is inversely proportional to the square root of population size. In short, small populations evolve fast in his mind because of stochastic fluctuations, clearly drift. I've posted a fair amount about stochastic dynamics...and it's complicated. Science is complicated. That's just life. Now, Dyson is pretty much wrong. But his intuition is conventional; I've met many people who believe that somehow evolution can operate more effectively, faster, on small populations. I can't even count up how many people seem to believe that population bottlenecks are always the critical events in changing the character of a species. In a very primitive way I think people have a general sense that Sewall Wright's Shifting Balance model captures the essence of evolutionary dynamics; though like ...