Re: Heritability of fitness


"g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dp6lul$1q8n$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Then, too, there is the issue of a mutation's not occurring in each
and
> every individual offspring.

That evolutionarily significant recessive recombinations and mutations
often don't occur
is something we just have to learn to accept. :-)

> I am willing to be persuaded of anything... GIVEN facts and arguments
that I
> can make sense of.

Okey then!

Consider every *crucially adaptive* mutation (or ditto heritably encoded
phenotypic novelty)
a phylogenetic memory or marker of the type - or of the combination of
types - of lifetime challenges that each one of these "selection
pressure mastering" crucially mutant individuals were thereby critically
helped to meet.

(Amongst "opportunity type" evolutionary challenges the most basic is
the challenge (or pressure) to reproduce. John Edser should approve.)

Also, mutations that lead to realtime adaptational flexibility, variable
reproduction rate, and variable mutation rates, in response to
environmental challenges, have, on average, a longterm adaptive
advantage.

Mutations that lead to a 'double-edged' increase in realtime
adaptational flexibility (i.e., that improve a new generation's ability
to take some more or less immediately reproduction-promoting
environmental opportunity *whilst* also improving its ability to deal
with some environmental adversity) can be referred to as
"ambiadvantageous".

Here, "ambiadvantageous" is meant in an even looser sense than within my
simplifying description of how and why our "Actention Selection Systems"
incorporate "endo-opiates" (e.g. endorphins/enkephalins, dynorphin",
etc.) amongst all other neurotransmitters.

IOW, in this more general than usual sense, "ambiadvantageous" mutations
cause a developmental construction of 'polyvalent chemophysioanatomical
program structures'.

"Ambiadvantageous mutations" are only guaranteed to have been
procreation promoting in individuals who pioneered them, or at least not
procreation preventing in individuals who just carry such mutations with
a lineage-lenghtening result.
------------------

Moreover:

Most of us prefer to feel mirth rather than misery!

And so, when by pairing (and as if elaborately placing or even plaiting)
this preference together with my motivation to make a serious point
about an insidiously 'pressuring' (unconsciously co-motivating) presence
of a both profoundly important and ignored (both super-complex and
super-slippery) feature of people's psychophysiology, and the
phylogenetic origin of this feature (the extremely common lifetime
origin of this "pressuring"), then I feel I ought to be forgiven. :-)

Hence, I shall end - end this by my own EIMC sponsored intercEPTing
reply to your post - by mentioning that any typical, intact, and
normally developed human ASS is the cell-structural correlate of (or
central control/switching station for) a neural individual's innate
(even embryogenesis endowed) and acquired repertoire of preoccupations,
and of our capacity to, on one hand, selectively pay transiently
conscious actention, and, on the other hand, becoming and remaining
selectively unconscious - including to be selective unconscious of pain
in self and others.
---------------

> >
> > One other comment - I would have thought that there must be enough
natural
> > environmental change out in the wild, and enough variation capable
> > of exploiting that change, that fitness heritability would be large
> > enough to measure - at least over timescales in which the new
environment
> > is constant. But apparently the 'signal-to-noise' ratio is just too
high.
> >

>>From your semantics I seem to pick up that the signal is too soft.

Whenever a study finds that a particular population's "fitness
heritability signal" is not detectable, this can sensibly mean only one
thing:
1. That, for as many generations as a study of a population's size in
response to a specific (as far as known or specifiable) environmental
change covers, the population does neither increase (positive amplitude
signal ;) nor decrease [negative value of this most interesting measure
;-)] but remains stable - hence is "not detected".

The "noise" must in this case surely refer to the scientists' snoring.

Or perhaps the concept was stuffed from the start? ;-)

Happy New Year!

P


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