Re: NS and AaD curves
- From: William Morse <wdmorse@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 01:00:32 -0400 (EDT)
"g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:dhl5i4$rbb$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
> "Anon." <bob.ohara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:dhha73$29c1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> That would be a change in the environment: fitness is defined to be
>> specific to an environment. If the environment changes, so does
>> fitness.
> Something's missing here, because the ratio of Bs to bs is conserved
> -- unless there is another rule (or several more rules) in the
> ontology.
> Let me write down statements, as you give them to me, so I can arrive
> at the meaning of 'fitness'. I am not arguing here -- just trying to
> understand the ontology:
> Statement One -- Fitness is the mathematical odds of a gene's being
> passed on from a parent to an offspring.
No, fitness is the expected odds of an offspring with a given gene
surviving, given the expected environment. As Bob noted, fitness is
specific to an environment. Which means you should rethink the following
statement:
> Based upon this statement, invironment would have no impact at all.
> What subsumptive statement or statements might I add that would
> account for any change in ratio of Bs to bs to change?
>> Let's say that
>>> some psychoneurotic guy lives in cave in a swamp, because of some
>>> genetic coding that renders him anti-social, and he does not get
>>> infected. Let's suppose that, after the pandemic has passed, and
>>> our swamp hermit has a sufficient libido to venture out of the swamp
>>> and rape a few of the pandemic-surviving females, and a few children
>>> result, and a few inherit the
>>> gene or genes that assured
>>> survival in his anecdotal case. That gene, or those genes,
>>> survived. Right? Survival of the fittest. Right?
>> No. Luck. You're still assuming that fitness measures the actual
>> number of offspring. This isn't right.
> No. That did not occur to me. The offspring of the dead victims of
> the pandemic, after it has run its course is a null set. Hence, I am
> thinking only of who gets to pass any gene along thence forward.
I think a point you may be missing is that there are two components to
evolution, what I might call the "mathematical" (expected) and the
"historical" (contingent). As an illustration, mammals that eat ants and
termites have evolved several times: anteaters, aardvarks, pangolins,
echidnas, and numbats. They share many features : long snouts, powerful
front claws, sticky tongues. So in an environment which contains ants or
termites, a generic "anteater" will be a fit organism, and some of its
features are predictable, i.e. mathematical. But which particular
anteater evolved where is contingent: the echidna in Gondwana, the numbat
in Australia, the aardvark in Africa, the anteater in South America, the
pangolin in Laurasia. They are similar but not identical, and the reasons
for their differences are probably more historical than mathematical,
i.e. "luck" played a role.
Yours,
Bill Morse
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: NS and AaD curves
- From: g
- Re: NS and AaD curves
- References:
- Re: NS and AaD curves
- From: g
- Re: NS and AaD curves
- Prev by Date: Two basic points
- Next by Date: Re: Units of IBD
- Previous by thread: Re: NS and AaD curves
- Next by thread: Re: NS and AaD curves
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading
