Barry Arrington should stick to what he’s good at — banning blasphemers.
Instead, he has disinterred the corpse of the “natural selection is a tautology” argument, propped it up in a chair, and is now attempting to engage it in conversation.
Trust me, Barry – that corpse is dead, dead, dead. Among the coroner’s findings:
1. Even the dimmest of IDers and creationists accepts that “microevolution” occurs. Insects become pesticide-resistant. Finch beaks change in response to drought conditions. Microbes acquire antibiotic resistance. How does this happen? Through natural selection. It ain’t a tautology.
2. The tautology mongers miss a basic point about fitness. Fitness is <i>not</i> defined in terms of the reproductive success of an individual. An unfit individual who gets lucky and reproduces successfully does not get reclassified as fit. A fit individual who gets hit by a meteorite isn’t reclassified as unfit. To claim that “the fittest” are “those who survive”, as the tautology mongers claim, is ridiculous.
Back to hunting down blasphemers, Barry. Leave the science to those who understand it.
Alan Fox asks:
When subject commodities are compared to target goals, such as in designed evolutionary algorithms that are set up to solve various target problems. in such cases, “fitness” refers not to survival, but to the capacity of a commodity to acquire the goal.
If fitness is not tautologically the same as “survival”, then fitness must refer to some other commodity. What other commodity does it refer to?
In experimental evolution studies, and also in studies in natural populations, survival probabilities of different genotypes (or of phenotypic classes) are measured. That can be done by, for example, mark-recapture studies or by observation of all individuals. Numbers of offspring for the survivors are also measured. That can be done by direct observation or by genotyping offspring and inferring who their parents are.
Predictions are made and we look at the next generation to see whether the expected changes occur. There are lots of nice equations for those predictions.
Of course, in more complex life cycles, such as with overlapping generations, we need to measure age-dependent birth and death rates.
It is an awful lot of work, and my hat is off to those who actually do it. Being told by you that what they are doing is a tautology, or that they are just waving their hands in the air and saying “stuff changed, so natural selection did it” might make the evolutionary biologists understandably grumpy.
Joe Felsenstein said:
So fitness is measured by taking count of that which has survived. Fitness = survival. Tautology.
Joe Felsenstein,
Joe, This is nothing close to an answer as to HOW do you measure what is fitness? Are you purposely being obtuse?
What determines what is a fitness attribute and what isn’t?
People who are smart enough to see through bullshit are understandably grumpy when someone makes an assertion of fact, and then can not directly answer a question pertaining to that assertion.
wjm:
in such cases, “fitness” refers not to survival, but to the capacity of a commodity to acquire the goal.
Such as survival?
You don’t think that inferring how many offspring a newborn animal is going to have among the newborns in the next generation has anything to do with fitness?
Wow.
Have you ever heard of population genetics?
Joe,
I was well aware that when you made the claim that ““If fitness is a tautology, how come we measure it…” that you were making a dubious claim, that you would certainly later try to obfuscate.
I called your bluff, and asked you very directly, “Tell us how fitness is measured?” And your answer is:
“You don’t think that inferring how many offspring a newborn animal is going to have among the newborns in the next generation has anything to do with fitness?”
Do you think this answer is worthy of someone who calls themselves an expert on this subject?
Then you further whine about how evolutionary biologist get grumpy when they are told their work is a tautology.
You were never going to be able to answer the question about How exactly do we measure what is fitness, because, as William said, fitness is measured only by survival. Everything else you say is just amateur slight of hand con game.
William has demonstrated his inability to tell the difference between amateur slight of hand con games (Uri Geller) and genuine ability. So what William says is really rather irrelevant when it comes to deciding this sort of thing.
Yeah, about that. Other then this venue, what are you doing to get this “news” out to a wider audience of evolutionary biologists?
Oh, what’s that? You don’t know any or know where they might hang out?
Well, never mind. 1 down, N to go!
How many do you suppose N will have to be before we get that shift to ID that ID claims is always *about* to happen?
I’ve already explained why and how that is not actually a tautology. Please read my post again, and if you did not understand something, let me know and I’ll endeavor to explain it more slowly to you.
I’m glad you’re asking questions. In my experience, it is useful to know both what some proposition expresses and what a tautology is when making an assertion to the effect that the proposition in question expresses a tautology. As far as I can tell, neither Arrington nor his defenders on this thread actually understand either of those things.
As you can imagine, those deficiencies make their claim pretty much worthless, in spite of any inherent value of skepticism for its own sake–either on this forum or anywhere else.
“Why would I concern myself with evidence, when IMO “evidence” is only the mind arranging thought and matter to support what one already wishes to believe?” – William J Murray.
A statement I found worthy of my (Driver’s) signature at atbc. Also, passim. You also said here that it was impossible to assign a probability to it raining in New York on a given day months in the future. Presumably because rain is personal whim rather than evidence of weather patterns.
As I see it, the phrase “survival of the fittest” easily lends itself to a tautological interpretation, because “survival” and “fitness” are inter-defined.
But this has no bearing on evolutionary theory, because we have non-tautologous, operationalized definitions of fitness. The Stanford Encyclopedia Article on fitness claims that among theoretical biologists and philosophers of biology, there’s a debate between advocates of “ecological fitness” and “fitness as probabilistic disposition”. (This relates to whether natural selection applies to individual organisms or only to populations as well.)
While there are interesting arguments made on both sides, the one thing that should be perfectly clear from this is that fitness is not being defined tautologically by any serious biologist or philosopher of biology.
Yes, this is a skeptical zone. To refresh your memory, the assertion I expressed skepticism about was yours: “Darwinism offers emotionally appealing slogans to the materialist/atheist/naturalist, nothing more. None of that has anything to do with conducting science.” In context, you were referring particularly to the concepts of natural selection and fitness. I explained why I was skeptical: your claim does not at all match my experience in doing scientific research. So far you’ve offered neither evidence nor argument to support your claim, nor have you displayed any knowledge of how the concepts are used in science. Could you please start offering some support.
As for how I use the concepts of selection and fitness, it’s a little surprising that you don’t already know. You didn’t make your claims about how useless these concepts are to the conduct of science without a deep knowledge of how scientists actually do use them, did you?
In any case, I think of fitness as a summary statistic describing relative expected reproductive success of different genotypes. Alleles that confer fitness different from 1.0 are one (but not the only) cause for allele frequencies to change at rates different from those expected from sampling variance (i.e. drift). One of the things I’ve worked on is identifying alleles that have changed in frequency faster than expected under drift, since of those alleles confer fitness greater than one. Those alleles are likely to be of biological and medical interest. I see no role for the concept of design here. On the contrary: one reason for being interested in positively selected alleles is that they may be more likely to have negative effects on health, which presumably would represent “bad design” in a design framework.
William J Murray:
William,
To see how inane your claim is, consider an analogy.
Someone designs a program to keep kids in school so that more of them will graduate. A small pilot study is run, and kids receiving the intervention are found to be 40% more likely to graduate.
Supporters want to implement the program statewide. Critics point out that the pilot study was small, and they argue that the effect was illusory — a statistical fluke. The supporters win the battle, and the legislature funds a statewide rollout.
In a few years, the results are in, and statewide graduation rates have improved by 37%.
According to you, this is all tautological. The students who graduate are the students who graduate. Nothing useful has been learned. What a gigantic waste of taxpayers’ money.
Do you see your mistake?
May I just point out, to those who claim fitness is measured by survival, that it is actually measured by survival and reproduction? By forgetting about reproduction you have each lost 10 points on the exam.
Survival of alleles means sex if you’re diploid. Do I get a pass?
davehook,
I asked KN to “point” me to where I supposedly said those things for a reason; so I could examine the context of any quote he might offer to support his assertion. Even so, I don’t see the connection between the quote you offered and what KN said (and is apparently unwilling to back up).
BTW, for future reference, personal opinions are not assertions about reality.
Can you point me to where I said that?
You get only 5 of the 10 points restored, as there are asexual diploid organisms such as dandelions and bdelloid rotifers.
First, you and William lose 10 points by forgetting that fitness is measured by survival and reproduction.
I see that you need a more detailed explanation. Let’s take a case where we can identify individuals in a population, figure out their genotypes at the relevant locus, and record how many offspring each individual has. That makes it easiest.
For genotype AA we find that there are 65 individuals in the population. We wait until they reach adulthood and find that there are 44 left. We see how many offspring each has and find that the AA survivors have a total of 187 offspring.
In this simple case fitness is the product of the probability of survival, times the number of offspring per survivor, times 1/2. That would for this genotype be (44/65) x (187/44) x (1/2). This is 1.438.
If we do this for each genotype, we can then make predictions as to how the proportions of the genotypes will change in the next generation.
See, actual science. Predictions. No tautology.
Thanks Joe. Another advantage of this site over UD – you learn things.
I’ve been reading Talbott’s “Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness“, which is where this whole discussion started.
As far as I can tell, Talbott’s complaint is not that fitness is tautologically defined (though he does raise this worry). Rather, Talbott’s principle criticism is that the complexity and messiness of organismal developmental dynamics, organism-environment dynamics, and organism-population dynamics make it impossible to measure the contribution that any specific trait makes to fitness. This threatens to make fitness a useless concept, he argues, because he thinks that the primary role of the concept of fitness is to work as a counter-balance to the randomness of mutations. And it is that — the creative role that ultra-orthodox Darwinism assigns to random mutations — that is the main target of his criticisms.
On this point I completely agree with Talbott. I should also say that I’ve read a good deal of Talbott’s work, I’m in email correspondence with him, and I think he is basically correct in his philosophy of life or Naturphilosophie. (Coleridge is one of his deepest influences.)
I tend to be more interested in estimating the contribution of a specific genotype to fitness, rather than a specific trait. I don’t see any conceptual difficulty in that.
William Murra,
No-one is going to trawl through nigh on two years of threads. Deny you said these things if you like.
davehooke,
davehooke,
Where they are assertions about reality, then indeed they are.
Richardthughes,
Haha, That’s a good one Richard.
You just learned from Joe that survival of the fittest doesn’t mean just surviving, it also means survival of those that reproduce. Wow, I can see why you really appreciate this resource Richard, there is a staggering amount of space left in your brain to fill.
Is this Joe’s escape from avoiding the question of how we can measure fitness? By saying we can measure those that reproduce? Wow stunning. I guess we can just change the phrase to reproducing of the reproducers, because Joe has just shown us that the important thing in Darwinian evolution is not the ability to survive, its the ability to reproduce. Why not just drop the phrase survival all together then? What good is it. Natural selection then becomes a change in frequency of alleles by those that reproduce better. And how do we know which ones reproduce better??
By seeing which ones reproduce better!!! Voila!
And Joe Felsenstein sits idly by and says, see, this isn’t a tautology now. Oh the brilliance of an education.
phoodoo,
Maybe Richard was referring to this:
there are asexual diploid organisms such as dandelions and bdelloid rotifers.
I didn’t know that myself, but I suppose you already did. If so, cool! Now you just have to learn what a tautology is and what ‘survival of the fittest’ means. At that point you’ll no doubt be able to make an intelligent contribution on this thread!
Steve Schaffner,
I think Joe has just given you a great way to measure the contribution of a specific genotype to fitness, the fittest ones are those that reproduce (Joe has just shown that we can drop the word survival, because it is THAT which made the tautology problem!) .
So let’s see, which genotypes are the most fit to reproduce? Those that reproduce better!
walto,
Do you mean to say that Joe’s revelation that survival of the fittest means those that reproduce better reproduce better wasn’t the stroke of genius that Richard just learned from this site?
Wow, I can’t believe that Richard already knew that, because it is such an amazing piece of insight that Joe has added here. I mean who could have guessed that Natural Selection meant survival of the reproducers.
I guess it was just me who was blown away by this discovery, you must have already known this. How clever of you Walto.
Let’s assume that the Darwin/Spencer formula for fitness it a tautology. What if that weren’t a problem? What if there were necessary truths about reality? What are “necessary truths about reality” ?
Should I try to define that, or would I rather leave it to be hammered out in the dialogue? I much prefer the latter. So I’ll drop the puck here and see what happens. No wait, it needs a little something more.
A necessary truth about reality would be a proposition (or propositional function etc.) that is true both logically and empirically. Okay let’s try stopping there.
phoodoo,
Read my reply to William, and then come back and explain to us how it’s all a tautology.
keiths,
You mean your analogy that the more that kids stay in school, the more number of graduates you have? You mean that proof that its all not tautological?
Can I reply later after I wake up from a shock induced coma?
I wasn’t looking for a way to measure the contribution of genotypes for fitness, but thanks for your effort. You are almost correct, I believe, in one thing. “Fitter organisms are likely to reproduce more” is tautologous (at least to my understanding and ignoring nuance), since “fit” is just a word used to mean “likely to reproduce more”. If that’s all critics have to contribute, then we can shake their hands, congratulate them and go back to ignoring them, since they have nothing relevant to contribute.
A more interesting statement is, “Fitter alleles increase in frequency.” This is not a tautology, and it very often not true. Fitness describes a statistical tendency, and in finite populations, fitter alleles often decrease in frequency. “Fitter alleles tend to increase in frequency” is true much more of the time, but it’s still not a tautology, and it’s not always true. There are alleles that lead to greater reproductive success but that still are almost certain to decrease in frequency.
phoodoo,
Slow down and think for a minute. If you and William were right, then it would be a complete waste of money to run clinical trials on a new cancer drug.
After all, the effectiveness of a cancer drug is defined in terms of how well it inhibits the growth and spread of tumors. What do the clinical trials measure? How well the drugs inhbit the growth and spread of tumors. The effective drugs are the ones that are effective. Tautology!
Therefore we should end all clinical trials. They’re a waste of money.
I think even you can now see where you and William screwed up.
I probably disagree with E Seigner on many issues, especially religious. However, I must compliment him on this comment at UD.
Paul Amrhein,
“Necessary truths about reality” are, to put it mildly, problematic. It seems that we can’t live with ’em and we can’t live without ’em. I’ve talked about this before in various threads over the past year or so.
Here’s the important thing, though: necessary truths about reality can’t be tautologies, because tautologies (like contradictions) are completely uninformative about the world. The sentence, “bachelors are unmarried men” tells you how the concepts bachelor, married, and men are related. It tells us nothing about what must (or cannot) actually be the case.
Compare that with “every event must have a cause” or “every self-conscious mind must be able to distinguish its own internal states from physical objects that it experiences”. These are (putatively) a priori truths that, while necessarily true, are not true “by definition alone”, whereas tautologies are true (and necessarily true) by definition alone.
Can you name such target goals in any biological structure? Goal means intention a priori. Can you prove intention a priori for any biological structure?
Exactly, fitness in designed evolutionary algorithm is given by the characteristics of this commodity that make it capable of acquiring the goal. You can observe that this commodity is fit when it acquires the goal. In the same way, fitness in living organisms is given by the characteristics that make them more capable of survival and reproduction. In a dry zone, water stress tolerant individuals are fitter. The result of that fitness is that those individuals will probably leave more offspring.
For example, you can track the offspring of a number of individuals and measure some of their characteristics. If there is a relationship between variability in any characteristic and offspring size, you might have something..
The choice of characteristics to study should be based on knowledge about this organism’s life cycle. I would not expect it to be a simple thing. Tolerance to environmental stress, attractiveness to the opposite sex, skills to avoid predation, etc. are some of the characteristics that might make an individual fit, but also communication skills, memory, orientation, parenting skills.
Man, you got that way wrong. The consequence of fitness is reproduction (of those who survive long enough to reproduce) and not survival of those who reproduce.
Scientists have done it. It’s evolution deniers that still stick to it as well as they stick to darwinian evolution (that is scientifically obsolete).
What are the main constraints to a population? What are the main causes of mortality or failure to reproduce? In arid zones, water stress. Plants with their leaves pointing up do not get so hot. That is fitter.
I don’t see them as problematic. I see them as fundamental to science.
I would be careful about that one. A measuring convention, as used in science, is true by definition alone. Yet it establishes important empirical procedures without which science could not function.
Davehooke and Kantian Naturalist:
It is duly noted that neither of you are willing or able to back up your claims about what I said.
I didn’t “sit idly by”. I worked hard to show phoodoo that fitness is the product of probability of survival and reproduced offspring per parent.
But phoodoo didn’t get it — phoodoo thinks that I said that survival is not involved and only reproduction counts.
phodoo, read my comment again. I shouldn’t have to do all the work while you sit idly by.
Guillermoe said:
It may also be that water stress tolerant individuals are less likely to leave the area as water becomes scarce and end up stranded, dead and extinct when another set of individuals, who were less water-stress tolerant, had the motivation to move and find water early, before it became too scarce for survival. Those who were less tolerant to water stress would then be fitter.
This is why the concept of fitness is a tautology and non-scientific. If the individuals in the water stress situation survive and reproduce because (1) they are water-stress tolerant or (2) water-stress intolerant (X, and not-X), Darwinists would still claim it was the result of survival of the fittest.
It’s a meaningless concept.
That’s because I don’t care. To quote Captain Reynolds, “my days of not taking you seriously are definitely coming to a middle.”
William J. Murray,
First, I was thinking about plants. Regarding animals, I agree with you: skills to find water would be a much better characteristic for fitness.
Second, fitness is a probabilistic thing. It’s not absolute. Being fit does not guarantee survival or reproduction to an individual since random deadly events happen.
Third, you can’t analyze fitness considering any possible aspect. Soemthing that you should be familiar with from design. You can’t design something that will resist any possible contingency.
So, it’s not that fitness is not scientific. YOUR CONCEPTION OF FITNESS IS NOT SCIENTIFIC. And your conception of fitness is wrong.
“If the individuals in the water stress situation survive and reproduce because (1) they are water-stress tolerant or (2) water-stress intolerant (X, and not-X), Darwinists would still claim it was the result of survival of the fittest.”
Clearly, in this population, water stress tolerance is not a parameter of fitness. Try this with plants. Water srtess tolerant plants survive and reproduce. The others die and don’t reproduce. This increases water stress tolerance in the next generation. Explain to me how this is a tautology and non scientific.
William,
I still await your response to this comment:
William:
William,
To see how inane your claim is, consider an analogy.
Someone designs a program to keep kids in school so that more of them will graduate. A small pilot study is run, and kids receiving the intervention are found to be 40% more likely to graduate.
Supporters want to implement the program statewide. Critics point out that the pilot study was small, and they argue that the effect was illusory — a statistical fluke. The supporters win the battle, and the legislature funds a statewide rollout.
In a few years, the results are in, and statewide graduation rates have improved by 37%.
According to you, this is all tautological. The students who graduate are the students who graduate. Nothing useful has been learned. What a gigantic waste of taxpayers’ money.
Do you see your mistake?
William,
Take a look at this one also:
phoodoo,
Slow down and think for a minute. If you and William were right, then it would be a complete waste of money to run clinical trials on a new cancer drug.
After all, the effectiveness of a cancer drug is defined in terms of how well it inhibits the growth and spread of tumors. What do the clinical trials measure? How well the drugs inhbit the growth and spread of tumors. The effective drugs are the ones that are effective. Tautology!
Therefore we should end all clinical trials. They’re a waste of money.
I think even you can now see where you and William screwed up.
William,
I’ll leave it to you and phoodoo to inform all the cancer patients that we can’t keep wasting money on tautological and non-scientific clinical trials.
I was being thick earlier. I forgot about Google!
“Why would I concern myself with evidence… “
Can’t assign probabilities to raining in NY
I wasn’t making these quotes up. You really said these things.
Guillermoe,
I think William answered you perfectly, but you don’t seem to get it. The only way of knowing if a trait is more fit, is by seeing which organisms with which traits reproduce. There is no other criteria. The narrative of WHY you call one aspect more fit and another aspect less fit, must describe how the organism is able to reproduce (Lets please drop Joe’s silly contention that if we use the words survive AND reproduce-our problems are solved).
In fact, Joe’s little caveat causes an even bigger problem for you, in deciding which organism (alleles) are fitter. How do you know that the attribute for which causes an organism to survive doesn’t also cause it to be sterile, or at least less sterile than others. For instance, people talked about the speed of a wolf making it better at running and catching prey, and also escaping being eaten, so this must be an allele which is described as more fit, whilst a slow wolf is less fit. But maybe a slow wolf burns less calories. Maybe it hangs around the females more. Maybe it is less likely to develop pneumonia, maybe it has better quality sperm.
How can we know for sure. There is only one way. Measure how well it reproduces. Bingo.
Now Steve Shaffer is here to say that no no, This is not tautologous because we are only looking at “statistically” which model reproduces better, not which reproduces better every time. All I can say about that is that its a complete red herring. That’s just saying, There are exceptions. So? I don’t think that changes anything.
keiths,
If your analogy made any sense at all, then one could do a clinical trial about cancer drugs. You have two drugs. In the first Drug A, they found that the drug instantly induced a coma in the patient which allowed them to survive another 30 years with the cancer. The patient however is unable to think, speak or move.
In drug B the cancer patients on average survived another ten years of healthy living.
The drug companies decided to scrap Drug B, because A was more effective.