Re: Paper: Environmental Coupling of Selection and Heritability
- From: "John Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:49:20 -0400 (EDT)
"Perplexed in Peoria" jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:-
... This study is interesting to me for a number of reasons.
One is that it touches on issues related to maternal effects and
Edser's eccentric definition of fitness. Birth weight depends more
on the mother's genetics than the lamb's, and it has a big impact on
whether the lamb survives to maturity. So this is a case where Edser's
view of fitness may actually work better than the conventional view.
JE:-
Firstly, it is not just my definition of fitness, it is my definition as the
only self consistent fitness that CAN be derived from the Darwinian theory.
If yourself or anybody else here has another then please provide it.
Secondly it is not "eccentric", just chronically ignored even while
remaining REFUTBALE proving a bias against it. I remind readers that no
other refutable fitness exists within evolutionary theory. This is why any
requirement for one is just thrown out by those who cannot provide one.
But it also touches on one of my recent themes - the heritability of
fitness and of fitness components. The apparent paradox is that
birthweight seems to be heritable, and is positively correlated with
fitness of lambs, but sheep are not evolving toward higher weights.
Why not?
The answer seems to be that there is a balance when averaged over
a varying environment. In bad years, it is best to be a mother producing
high-birth-weight lambs, which can survive the harsh conditions. But in
good years, it is better for the mother to produce low-birth-weight
twins, who have good survival chances in those years. Amusingly, Edser's
viewpoint sees this as natural, while the more conventional approach
needs considerable analytical machinery (negative covariances, etc.) in
order to provide the explanation.
JE:-
The Darwinian argument would be:
1) The genes in the infertile offspring are not selectable within these
forms because they remain sterile. Note that this is just a "duh"
proposition. The only possible way that any gene can be selected is within
the body of a mature and fertile parent. It is here that birth weight
epistatic gene combinations (the trait is not additive but even if it was
just additive the fitness of each gene that code for that trait remains not
additive) are selected in order to increase the total number of lambs raised
to fertile adulthood within one population as a TDF (Total Darwinian
Fitness) maximand which does not NECESSARILY act for the fitness benefit of
each and every infertile immature lamb.
2)Any empirical gene fitness has to be minimally epistatic as described by
Waddington's 100% ignored "Post Neo Darwinistic model" only because
Waddington's revision of Haldane was and remains, minimally organism centric
and NOT gene centric.
snip<
Regards,
John Edser
Independent Researcher
edser@xxxxxxxxxx
.
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