Re: The Cost of Substitution [possible REPOST]

in article em7v5l$2uh7$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Tim Tyler at
seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 12/18/06 10:00 PM:

Guy A Hoelzer wrote:
seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 12/14/06 10:43 AM:

What is the currency of this cost? [...]
That depends on how you measure it. If as fitness, or as a
variance, it will be usually be a pure number.

I am not opposed to the utility of numbers without dimensions,
but they cannot represent costs, which to me must be material.

This seems like a 'how many dollars do you have in your pocket'
issue to me.

Dollars are a currency representing many kinds of materials. Our concept of
fitness is much the same. Is this what you are suggesting? Are you saying
that the cost discussed with regards to Haldane's dilemma is a fitness cost?
If so, I think there is a critical difference between dollars and fitness in
this context, because fitness is just a heuristic concept that we can freely
inflate or deflate without any undue effect (without misleading ourselves).
Dollars would not serve their purpose if the same was true in that context.
This makes dollars a material currency, but this does not apply to fitness.

One way of measuring fitness is as a count of immediate offspring.

This is a pretty good proxy for the notion of fitness.

For a given species, that seems to be about as material as
count of dollars to me.

Absolutely. I am just trying to make more concrete the claims being made in
the debate about a cost imposed by the fixation of alleles in populations.
Are you saying the cost comes in the form of immediate offspring? In other
words, when a fixation happens individuals are somehow compelled to produce
more offspring as a sort of compensation?

I don't expect that this is what you are saying, but I am continuing to push
for somebody to step up and tell me what this supposed cost is. The more
responses I get without defining a material cost (the price of fixation),
the less inclined I am to think that there is anything more than hot air in
the claim.

Guy


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Reproductive Excess: Is Required
    ... >> ReMine's cost appears to be an absolute cost ... > The cost of substitution is not paid in fitness units. ... TDF cannot ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: What is R (relatedness) Suppose to Represent in
    ... Organism fitness altruism is NOT just ... then this constitutes a zero cost to the ... organism mutualism via an actor _investment_. ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: Felsenstein and reproductive excess
    ... > based his cost concept on "genetic death", ... Sub selection is a dependent act of selection, ... sterile immatures to become fitness equivalent to fertile adults they ... and the reproduction rate required to produce it. ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: Origin of sex - not why but who and when?
    ... number of copies, cost of copying, total mass of resources, ... once again I am flipping from allele to individual (as you ... choose between the states in terms of fitness. ... but it's usually a dead end; the survivors are the sexuals. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Origin of sex - not why but who and when?
    ... number of copies, cost of copying, total mass of resources, ... once again I am flipping from allele to individual (as you ... choose between the states in terms of fitness. ... but it's usually a dead end; the survivors are the sexuals. ...
    (talk.origins)