In a very strange sense

From: Jim McGinn (jimmcginn_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 02/23/05 

Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:42:20 -0500 (EST)

I cut and pasted the following from one of my previous posts:

    **** Begin Cut and Paste ****

Why did Hamilton explain his hypothesis with verbiage
that is so ambiguous and so completely abstracted from
a rational understanding of cause and effect? The truth
is deeper and even more damning to Hamilton than any of
you seem capable of grasping. Hamilton's rule is a
concept the only purpose of which it serves is to
confound it's audience. We can think of it being a meme
that survives not because it indicates anything empirical
but because it confuses those who attempt to dispute it.

Which interpretation did Hamilton intend, #1 or #2?
Why did he not clarify which of these two meaning he
intended? The answer is that he intended both of them.
More precisely, he purposefully (*) left it ambiguous
because then the skyhook that is plainly apparent in
interpretation #2 would seem to disappear when one's
audience inadvertently (and temporarily) assumed
interpretation #1.

(*) I am using the term "purposefully" somewhat loosely
here. I suspect Hamilton was just as much a victim of
his poor grammar as are the rest of you dimwits.

Science never suffers from being too explicit. It also
never suffers from being overly accurate with one's
terminology. In the least Hamilton is guilty of very
poor english usage. It is the poor english usage that is
the cause of the confusion and it is the poor english
usage that creates a psychological trap that prevents
this idiotic notion, Hamilton's rule, from being rejected
for the nonsense that it truly is.

. . . the reason Hamilton employed the word
"replica," is not because this word precisely conveyed the
meaning that Hamilton intended but because this word was vague
enough that it could be interpreted either of these two ways.
This ambiguity makes Hamilton's rule very, very difficult to
refute because once somebody attacked it based on one
interpretation the defender could, in an intellectually
underhanded manner (ie. Joe Felsenstein), switch to the other
interpretation. It's an intellectual version of smoke and
mirrors.

    **** End Cut and Paste ****

Note that despite the fact that Peoria claimed that
Hamilton intended the IBD interpretation of "replica"
and not the similarity interpretation later, in the
same thread, he fell back into the similarity
interpretation of "replica."

Peoria wrote:
> The role that r plays is also tough
> to understand at the level of causation. "r" is a
> measure of genetic similarity between individuals in a
> very strange sense. Two very strange senses. First, it
> doesn't measure similarity, but rather the probability
> of a similarity. Second, it doesn't measure similarity
> in any absolute sense but rather in a relative sense.
> A pair of individuals with a high "r" between them are
> probably more similar to each other than are two
> randomly chosen individuals in the population (with an
> "r" between them of roughly zero). But whether they
> are very similar in an absolute sense will depend on
> the degree of similarity that is endemic in the population
> as a whole.

> It is not at all obvious that it works. But when you
> go through the math, you will see that it really
> DOES WORK.

The efforts that underly the production of the emperor's
new clothes also was not obvious. But when he adorned
his new attire everybody could *see* the quality of the
workmanship.

Jim

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