Re: Group selection in the breeding of super chickens
- From: Lorentz <drosen0000@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2008 16:26:17 -0500 (EST)
On Feb 7, 12:04 am, "John W Edser" <ed...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Your formulation STILL doesn't explain how a sexual animal can goAlso, what do you mean by "group selection". I suspect your
definition of group selection differs from mine.
JE:-
You are not new to this group. I must have defined these over a hundred
times by now. ...
1) Total Darwinian Fitness (TDF): the total number of just fertile forms
reproduced per parent per population. The only possible way to halt all
Darwinian natural selection within one natural population is to artificially
maintain TDF to remain equal per parent per population. Note that this also
remains the only way that heritable variation provided by just random
mutation and random sampling error can become empirically separated within a
natural population because after non random selection has been halted
entirely, all that remains are these random processes.
from being almost totally asocial to have a refined, sophisticated
group identification. The self contradiction can be seen in three easy
steps.
1) Your formulation doesn't allow us to consider the natural selection
of a gene. Talking about competition between genes is a narrow, gene
centric view. I can't talk about selfish genes, altruistic genes,
cheater genes, or even genes that make one good looking. I can only
talk about genes in the "sexually mature individual" or some
approximation of that concept.
2) The "sexually mature individual" never replicates itself
completely. Each sexually mature reproductively active individual
animal (your favorite unit) will vary greatly from it parents. Since
sexual animals exchange genes (the units you feel are too poorly
defined to be meaningful), each generation is different both
genetically and phenotypically from the next. We may resemble our
parents, but we never are exactly like our parents. So we don't know
what variation is acted on by natural selection, because "the whole
animal" doesn't have any trait that is 100% inheritable. If a
"sexually mature individual" is very fit, I can't discuss which of its
siblings carries the mantle of being its true copy.
3) By your definitions, there can be no sexually mature individuals
individuals that can be described as "group of more than one sexually
mature individual organisms." Otherwise, one is left with the same
ambiguities as in a "gene centric model." So I can't use group
selection in your formalism, either.
You can't make an ambiguity go away by saying "statistics lie."
Regardless of whether a model can be mathematically modeled or not,
the logic has to be describable linguistically. A linguistic ambiguity
is still an ambiguity. Its possible there is no completely unambiguous
formulation that completely describes natural selection. Never the
less, maybe you should document the points in your theory, and others
if you wish, where the concept is ambiguous.
.
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