Re: This snag EPTly dissolved for you - once again! (was:Hamilton's Rule In The Mirror)
- From: "Peter F - for EIMC Internetional Ptd. Lty." <fell_spamtrap_in@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 13:49:40 -0400 (EDT)
"John Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:d47a2r$2njr$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
> > > > Fitness is the ability to persist, not the means by which this is
> > > > done.
>
> JE:-
> The above can only argue that because all of life has persisted life
> must be "fit". What matters to evolutionary theory is how life has
> persisted so far, i.e. what exactly is the biological _mechanism_ that
> has allowed life to persist.
What also matters is what the specific "evolutionary pressures" that have
shaped
the functions that different life-forms *are* (rather than "have").
And, of all that, what ought to matter
the most to us are the pressures through which the process of Evolution
produced the type of animal that we are.
> Unless you lump all of life together as
> just the one gigantic group selective fitness total life has to be
> broken up into contesting forms each with their own independent fitness.
> Because resources are always finite, each independent fitness varies and
> all empirical fitnesses remain epistatic, every selectee must compete by
> default within one population where the fitter pass on a heritable
> fitness potential via their genes (an epistatically plural gene fitness)
> after every selectee within one population compares their final fitness
> results with every other by default.
>
Relative fitness _is_ "accounted for by Nature" when different
viable individuals compete for the same vital environmental resources
(extrinsic opportunity type challenges/evolutionary pressures)
to the effect that the individuals with the for reproductive survival most
efficient genetically underpinned functions (and, of course, most
efficiently thus co-determined behavioral strategies) is the ones most
likely to "win"
in this competition. That is, their "prize won" (handed them by Nature) is
the opportunity to
actually - not just potentially - 'stretch each their own little lineage yet
another generational notch.
> Unless it is argued that fitness must always remain a subjective measure
> of persistence by only employing an endless parental lineage you have to
> define each and every independent fitness as finite and _objective_ by
> actually counting and totaling the offspring reproduced by each parent.
That is what I would politely call an infertile or unproductive (as far as
gaining enhanced explanatory powers goes) type of thinking!
Instead, try to recognize, or take a new tack and think in terms of, which
significant types
and themes of environmental (and compatible intrinsic) evolutionary
challenges (positive and negative
selection pressures) could (and should) be used for further explaining
ourselves (and other animals) with.
> Competition firstly exists within discrete populations, i.e. between all
> the independent selectee's within one population.
Okay.
> If only genes (plural)
> can pass on a parents heritable fitness then sterile immatures cannot
> have an independent fitness just a dependent fitness. This is because
> all their genes remain locked in until they become fertile. If immatures
> are kept infertile all of their lives then they can never become
> independently selectable forms. Therefore, the genes that code for
> eusocial sterile casts can only be selected for within the fertile
> bodies of their parents and not within the bodies of any sterile
> (fitness dependent) immature offspring.
> This Darwinian explanation
> (which remains competitive to the Hamiltonian inclusive fitness
> viewpoint) could be refuted if any sterile cast that exists in nature
> was observed to become fertile but forced to again become sterile and
> remain so until it dies. To my knowledge this key event has never been
> documented within nature. However, no such empirical refutation exists
> for the Hamiltonian explanation.
That spuriously sophisticated reasoning of yours has caused much
brain power to be needlessly spent here in s.b.e..
However I soon saw that it is only a deceptively well dressed strawman
argument. ;-)
IOW, it is an example of a scientifically superfluous AEVASIVE thinking!
You might as well extend your thinking to include that selectable
new genophenotypes (or selectees) resides within bodies of populations.
(Bodies which may be as small or as few as a single presexual or
hermaphroditic
'bottleneck-squeezed' individual, by the way.)
I am not saying it is easy to perceive new features of how we evolved to be
the way(s) we are!
Why it is might now have become extra hard for you, is
because the result of your "independent research" has been
so rewarding and encouraging to you that it has reinforced your
particular intellectual (evolution theorizing) AEVASIVE style.
The extra rewards you have reaped stems from the fact that you have been
able to seduce highly intelligent - but nevertheless 'hodwinkable' - people
(such as, e.g., Perplexed, Felsenstein) by presenting them with the
challenge
of trying to sort out your campaign of complaining and your
commitment to your own infertile evolution-theoretical ideation.
I will now explain your central quibble and debate drawing ideation
in a neat little nutshell ;-):
The peeled off/boiled down essence of it is that
you are (for some personal psychological reason) offended by that
"important" people
think that altruistic behavior have evolved (as crudely described by
Hamilton's rule)
because in your mind only (or almost only?) mutualistically (rather than
altruistically)
adaptive behavioral traits can evolve, because, as you erroneously also
think,
fitness does not befall not yet naturally proven to be (or naturally
accounted for as being)
fertile individuals.
You may be right in that most people has not opened their eyes to
that what they call altruism is often just mutualism.
However, you are simply and obviously wrong in believing that altruistic
actors
who reap a direct and total individually reproductive defeat cannot have
evolved because fitness is all about selectees budding new and lengthening
old twigs and limbs
on the tree of evolution.
No, John, fitness (relative such) and phylogeny is ALSO about functions
(individuals)
being faced with evolutionary and environmental challenges/pressures.
---------------
The only fruitful "paths forward" [toward a more profound understanding of
how we (and other animals) came to be how we are] will go through
the scientific (and philosophical) fields and sub fields of hardcore
evolutionary and functional chemistry (at one end of biological Science) and
'evolutionary psychobiology
type' - or EPT aligned - analyses (at the other end).
It is (or seems - to me) immensely ironic that in people's scientific
(including rational philosophical) habits, pursuits, preoccupations,
and even paid such occupations, there is an 'inbuilt '
(inEPTly AEVASIVE) tendency to avoid certain key considerations
and to evade the drawing of implicitly CURSES-revealing/activating
completing (effectively philosophy terminating) conclusions.
Whether these normally automatically evaded conclusions can on the oddest of
occasions be drawn by help of concEPTs,
or some equivalently explicative and differently appropriately designed
concepts,
does not matter.
EPTly understood, it is ultimately uncertain
whether phylogenetic and non-genetic transmission (from one generation to
the next)
of outcomes of opportune and adverse lifetime
challenges (or evolutionary pressures) will produce more than one
instance of EPT understanding. %-|
In that knowledge lies my perversely conceived,
and, ironically enough, *still slightly inEPTly AEVASIVE*,
hope of mine.
Regards,
P
.
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