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Frankham, R.; Franklin, I.R.
Response to Lynch and Lande
1998 Animal Conservation (1): 73-73
Lynch & Lande's (1998) comments on our paper (Franklin & Frankham, 1998) misrepresent out purpose, deal largely with a different issue and do not refute our original criticism. Our paper is a commentary on Lande's (1995) suggestion that an effective size of 5000 is required to maintain evolutionary potential, not whether this size is adequate for conservation purposes. Lynch & Lande (1998) deal primarily with a different issue, the accumulation of new deleterious mutation in finite populations ('mutational meltdown'). This is a highly controversial issue; compare Lande (1995) and Charlesworth, Morgan & Charlesworth (1993). However, experimental tests by Gillian et al (1997) failed to find evidence of mutational accumulation in populations maintained with effective sizes of 25-500 for 45 and 50 generations.
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