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.
As it happens, there’s a website that gives probabilities and statistics for locations around the world on any day of the year. 38% chance of rain in NYC on September 1.
How does this translate to Natural Selection? What do your two drugs stand for? How is a drug inducing a coma like natural selection?
davehooke,
Patients who took Drug A were much fitter than patients who took Drug B. Look how much longer their lifespan is.
A particular family possesses a gene which makes it immune to, say, HIV. The family grows further despite exposure to the virus. Looking back we say that this is evidence of its fitness for such an atmosphere. I say that even if this is tautological, it is reasonable. However, unlike a tautology, survival or increase is informative. When one group thrives under conditions which destroy others, we know there’s something different about the surviving group. We can be confident that further study of that group will reveal the difference that made the difference.
phoodoo,
The analogy makes perfect sense.
In all three cases, we define a criterion, measure how well the criterion is met, and reach a scientific conclusion. It’s empirical, not tautological.
You can’t have it both ways. If fitness is tautological, then so is the effectiveness of educational interventions and cancer drugs.
Shut down the clinical trials! Phoodoo has spoken.
davehooke,
Right, and not to mention this, this, this, or this.
In fact, I think it was that whole conversation which convinced me that Murray wasn’t interested in being taken seriously.
Big boy pants.
Flapjacks are tasty carbohydrates.
Here you go, phoodoo.
At UD, Eric Anderson swings for the fences and misses.
Eric:
You might as well complain when a meteorologist talks about cloud formation, because cloud formation isn’t an actual force.
Exactly, which is why fitness isn’t defined in terms of an individual’s survival and reproduction. As I said in the OP:
Eric:
The vagaries average out over time and over different individuals. That’s why fitness isn’t defined in terms of the survival and reproduction of a single individual, just as batting averages aren’t defined with respect to single at-bats. We don’t reduce someone’s batting average to .000 every time he grounds out to third.
It’s definitely not the dominant thinking. You’re missing a third, obvious alternative: define fitness in terms of the average success of a genotype in a given environment. You don’t need to exclude any cases.
As I said above, the vagaries will average out over time and over populations.
The rest of Eric’s argument fails because it depends on the false dichotomy above.
Unsurprisingly, phoodoo is oblivious to Eric’s mistakes:
Vincent Torley may have better luck explaining things to Barry. Let’s see!
If you can’t move, you can’t reproduce. I’ve tried, and it just doesn’t work.
I note that defining fitness by the average (of half the product of survival and fecundity) over all individuals of a genotype is what I did in the numerical example I gave above.
To be more precise, fitness in such a case is the expectation of that product. In any sample of individuals from a population we won’t see exactly that value, but something close to it, closer he more individuals contribute to the average.
Hawking managed.
Barry should be mocked for not knowing his tort from his taut.
davehooke,
Right, but Drug B makes the cancer survivor sterile. The drug A patient lives longer. So now do you want to drop the “survival” aspect of the word fitness? Plus the recipients of Drug A can still produce sperm.
Joe Felsenstein,
Joe, do you think by simply figuring out an average percentage of survival solves your problem? What if the average of one allele compared to the other is 53 percent survival compared to 47. Then the next time you measure the average flips, and now the allele that you called less fit last time , is now more fit by 6 percent? You want a definition of fitness that is fluid day by day, hour by hour?
And your original problem still exists anyway. You are still simply measuring fitness by which reproduces most.
Phoodoo @ UD:
“VJ, as a very safe rule of thumb, if it is something Keith at TSZ has thought of, it almost certainly, positively, has no merit. That is much more constant truth than any NOW environment.”
Laughable to those who know what KeithS does for a living. But the statement does tell us about a very flawed thought process: Phoodoos.
It now seems as if fitness is a property of the genotype that is measured in terms of the phenotype. Is that right?
keiths,
I made the same point as Eric way above, and it’s fairly obvious, I think. These guys either can’t understand it or have too much invested in there being a tautology problem in evolutionary theory to try to understand it. Either way, fuck it.
Yeah, lol, who has ever heard of a jungle turning into a desert!
I’d say that the majority of creationists and design folks don’t understand evolutionary theory and don’t want to understand it, because they have deep-rooted ethico-political motivations for not wanting evolutionary theory to be correct.
The core of the debate has nothing to do with the compatibility or lack thereof between science and religion, because the creationists and design folks object to theistic evolution on ethical and political grounds. They object that theistic evolution waters down religion to the point where it doesn’t offer sufficient moral clarity or moral guidance. That’s a deeply conservative (i.e. social conservative, aka anti-intellectual, reactionary, and ultimately paranoid) mentality.
Creationism/design theory are the epistemological facet of the social conservative position in the culture wars. (Nothing else explains why the design movement takes the side of climate change denial.) Fortunately, conservatives are losing the culture war; unfortunately, they are winning all the debates that really matter.
Meanwhile, for those of us interested in current debates in evolutionary theory taken seriously by evolutionary biologists, there’s this: “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?“.
No, it’s not. There are many other ways to infer fitness. Basically, a fit marathonist would win more marathons. What you are saying is that the only way of knowing if a marathonist is getting fitter is counting how many marathons he wins. It’s absurd.
Because you are doing research. If you study this organism and find that, then clearly that attribute does not contribute to fitness and that’s it.
And maybe this is a movie and it’s not real. That’s why you do research. To eliminate the maybes.
Bingo what? Some characteristics in individuals increase their reproduction. The only way to know it is by checking that some characteristics in individuals increase reproduction. Yes, so what?
It is not “those who reproduce are the ones who reproduce”, as you claim. It’s “those with certain characteristics are the ones who reproduce more”. We can determine WHAT these characteristics are and HOW they contribute to increased reproduction.
How is this unscientific?
This is the key move, I think, that most critics of science fail to appreciate — one can figure out which possibilities can be eliminated by designing experiments, conducting those experiments, comparing the results with the predictions, and so on. It’s not a blank check written out to speculation.
Granted, even lots of philosophers who ought to know better fail to appreciate this transparently simple idea. One of my biggest complaints about Plantinga’s EAAN, for example, is that it makes no use at all of what we know about the cognitive neuroscience of intelligent animal behavior. And because he ignores that, he utterly fails in his stated aim, which is to show how naturalism undermines itself; it fails because he does not start off with how naturalists would describe their own doxastic situation in synchronic and diachronic neuro-somatic-ecological dynamics. Plantinga thinks that merely imagining alternative possibilities as to how beliefs are related to action is sufficient to refute naturalism, and that’s utterly daft.
One cannot hope to do good science, or even understand science, if one is overly fond of one’s “intuitions.”
Larry Moran and some commenters make some good points about this exchange (and RB shows up too).
Larry is uncomfortable with both sides in the Nature debate.
We want to estimate fitness in one generation, use it to make predictions about the next generation, and test hypotheses, one of the most relevant of which is that the fitnesses remain the same. Or that relative fitnesses remain the same (you do know the distinction between absolute and relative fitness, don’t you?). The absolute fitnesses might not remain the same. If they don’t, the relative fitnesses might or might not remain the same. Those are hypotheses we want to test, and the alternatives if both of those hypotheses of constancy are rejected are that fitnesses vary from generation to generation. There is a large theoretical literature on the consequences of such variation, as you must know.
So fitness is useful, can be inferred, and various ways that it can differ from generation to generation, and from region to region are interesting and worth investigating. None of that could happen if it were simply a tautological concept.
As for the issue of “measuring fitness by which reproduces most”, I can’t tell whether you mean taking adults and asking which genotypes produce the most offspring, or whether you are instead taking newborns, so that the measure of “reproduces” also includes the probability of survival to adulthood. We of course take both survival and fecundity into account. I assume you would too.
BruceS,
Whereas I come from a background in developmental systems theory, and so I think that the EES doesn’t go far enough!
Joe Felsenstein,
A minor aside: everything you say here is perfectly correct (so far as I can tell), and would be perfectly fine even if the definition of “fitness” were a tautological statement. This is for the simple reason that all definitions are tautologies. To say that a term is useless because its definition is a tautology is to say that all terms are useless.
The error here lies in thinking that definition is the very essence of meaning. It is not. Rather, if we think about how definitions are used, we noticed that definitions are useful for (perhaps, among other things) conveying what one already understands, helping someone acquire a new concept, or establishing a common ground for dialogue. That’s quite different from reflecting philosophically about conceptual content per se.
If one is a pragmatist and holist (as I am), one will be inclined to think that conceptual content or meaning essentially involves norm-governed inferential role. In the case of empirical concepts (including all scientific concepts), there are also norms that govern correct application of a concept in perception and norms that govern correct consequences of a concept in action.
As Joe F and others here have made perfectly clear, one can both implicitly understand and make explicit to others the correct and incorrect uses of the term “fitness” even if the definition of fitness is, as all definitions are, tautologous.
Kantian Naturalist,
Point taken. Maybe what I should have said instead is “None of that could happen if it were a vacuous concept.”
vjtorley, at UD:
Hi Vincent,
Let me stress that this view of fitness didn’t originate with me, by any stretch. It’s widely accepted among evolutionary biologists and population geneticists.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a workable definition of fitness based on individual survival and reproduction. For one thing, it would lead to absurdities such as the meteorite muddle: two identical individuals standing ten feet apart; one gets hit by a twenty-pound meteorite and dies; the other lives on and produces many viable offspring. Would we really want to claim that the former is less fit than the latter, despite their being identical (except for location)?
Also, such a concept of fitness would require us to label worker ants who fail to reproduce as abject fitness failures. Far more sensible to regard fitness as being a property of the genes, in which case the worker genes are highly fit — they succeed spectacularly in getting themselves into future generations, even if the sterile workers themselves cannot pass them along.
That’s right. The fact that fitness varies is obvious. No one is surprised, for instance, that genes for headlessness haven’t become widespread in the human population. Headless humans are less fit, for obvious and non-tautological reasons.
In other cases, the causality can be harder to trace. But as you point out, that doesn’t mean that the causes don’t exist. It’s an epistemological problem, not an ontological one.
In any case, the problem is hardly specific to evolutionary biology. Sciences of all kinds have to disentangle complicated webs of causality, which is why statistical methods are so important.
phoodoo, at UD:
The sun is out and shining, and a few hours later it goes down. Then after a while it rises again! Up, down, up, down — how can an organism possibly adapt to that?
Phoodoo, you crack me up.
I see that the 44 in the first factor is canceled by the 44 in the denominator of the second factor.
Real arithmetic 🙂
However as the product of any number by its multiplicative inverse is by definition 1 we also still have a tautology involved, just not the one from BA. Accordingly I am taking 10% from your score since it is evident in this recipe that survival and reproduction can be simply replaced by reproduction alone. Thus we have in the spirit of this discussion: “The reproduction of the fittest”. Now the question is: is that a tautology?
At UD, Eric Anderson attempts a response:
Sure, selection operates on the phenotype, but the phenotype is determined by the interaction of the genotype with the environment (broadly defined — remember that a gene’s environment includes the organism itself and the other genes within that organism). If the genes don’t make it into future generations, then neither do the associated phenotypes.
If that were true, then most of science would be tautological. You’re repeating William’s and phoodoo’s mistake, so I’ll just quote my replies to them:
And:
I love that Keith keeps repeating his humorous analogies, and then puffs his chest so proudly proclaiming his victory , “More kids that finish school, means that more kids graduate! If drug prevents cancer, less people get cancer! That should settle the problem for the ol buggers!”
And Richard Hughes is bragging about the great accomplishments of the wizard Keith. Haha.
I think Keith has already taken the Cancer Drug A. It has frozen his brain up. But hey, he survives longer!
Well, Phoodoo, I know that KeithS does something beyond the mental capabilities of most people so although I am sure he’s wrong from time to time he clearly is no idiot. Which is it odds with your slight ‘If Keith says it it must be wrong.’ I suspect you and him would have different answers to many questions – because he’s quite thoughtful and unencumbered by an ‘inerrant’ holy book…
phoodoo,
Do you think we can scientifically test the effectiveness of a cancer drug?
If your answer is no, then why do scientists spend millions of dollars on clinical trials? Are they idiots, like the evolutionists? Or do they understand something fundamental that continues to flummox you, Eric, and Barry?
On the other hand, if your answer is yes, then address the following question: Do you think we can scientifically test the fitness of genotypes?
I look forward to your explanation of how tests of a drug’s effectiveness are fundamentally different from tests of a genotype’s fitness, when everyone else can clearly see that they are based on the same, non-tautological principle.
Let the flailing begin.
Wow, Kantian, it takes some balls to say with a straight face that whilst it is the creationists who simply don’t want to believe the science because they have a “ethico-political motivations for not wanting evolutionary theory to be correct.” , as if the oh so ethical and altruistic evolution believers are void of any political motivation or religious cause.
Oh heavens no!, Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, and Neil Shubin and and PZ Myers, and Donald Prothero, and Eugenie Scott, and the entire core of the leading light of evolution voices, they most certainly have no political bias or worldview to promote! They are somehow completely immune to the “ethico-political” motivations for wanting evolution to be true. And clearly all of the posters here have the same immunity!
You know Kantian, I am at a loss for thinking of a more absurd, and possessing of a blind self awareness that one could write that would be more ridiculous than this post of yours. It’s as if someone wrote, “You know the problem with the Democrats is that they just have this “political agenda” that they want to push, whilst us noble Republicans, we are just here to help the country! Look at my flag lapel pin! We are patriots!”
How self-deluded does one have to be to write what you just did? Am I missing something? Was that satire? Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins don’t care about religion and aren’t out to push an agenda-they just want the truth? Are you out of your frickin mind?? How can you possibly claim to have any potential to write something truthful after this post?
Actually Phoodoo, they have no preconceptions from a holy book. That’s why their minds are free and yours will never be. You are dogmatic.
phoodoo, since you seem to have difficulty understanding simple analogies, let’s try a concrete case. We observe that when P. falciparum parasites are in an environment containing chloroquine, they survive and reproduce better if they have a certain set of mutations in the gene pfcrt. This is an observed fact about the world; it is not a tautology. We state this fact by saying that the parasites with the mutations are fitter (in that environment) that those without the mutations. “Ah ha”, you say! “Those that reproduce better are those that reproduce better! It’s a tautology! Biologists are morons!”
But of course, we weren’t really saying that the fittest parasites are those that reproduce best. “Fittest” was just how we say “tend to produce more offspring”. What we were saying is that those that reproduce best are the ones with the mutations. That’s the interesting fact — a particularly interesting one since it has killed millions of people. We’re busy describing the real world, and you’re busy tying yourself in knots because scientists have a special word for “tends to reproduce better”.
Really, this is one of the dumbest anti-evolution arguments I’ve run into, and that’s saying something.
I didn’t say you made them up. I said I’d like you to point out where I said those things so I could see the context.
My statement about evidence was not in relation to it’s value in an argument, but rather in relation to how I live my personal life – as I suspected.
davehooksaid:
What I actually said:
Note: I did not say it would be impossible to assign a probability to it raining on a particular day in new york city. In fact, my coin-flip statement set the probability from my point of view at 50%.
KN said:
Well, in my book, one doesn’t go to the trouble of lying about someone else’s views unless they care quite a bit.
“My statement about evidence was not in relation to it’s value in an argument, but rather in relation to how I live my personal life – as I suspected.”
So you live your life free from the tools of reason, William?
Steve Schaffner,
Ah, very interesting word choice Steve. Fitness is a genotype that “tends” to produce more offspring, fitness is NOT genotypes that actually do produce more offspring. Is that what you are saying Steve, before we continue any further?
Just so long as a genotype “tends” to produce more offspring in ANY given environment, then this is the definition of fitness, correct?
That’s what we’ve all been saying (correcting for your mangled usage, that is — fitness isn’t a genotype). Fitness is a statistical property: it is the expected (in the statistical sense) fraction of all offspring contributed to the next generation.
<blockquote.
Just so long as a genotype “tends” to produce more offspring in ANY given environment, then this is the definition of fitness, correct?
Your question is too ambiguous to answer. A genotype (or phenotype) is fitter in a given environment if on average it contributes more offspring to the next generation than less fit genotypes (or phenotypes) in that environment.
Steve Schaffner,
Whoa Steve, slow down, when we are doing science we have to be more accurate with our word usage. You are complaining about my so called mangling of a definition, but you have rewritten the words you want to define fitness several times. Can you write exactly what the definition of fitness is? Is it a statistical property, or an ACTUAL property?
Have you settled on the exact definition yet?
We’re not doing science here. Scientists are trying to explain science to those who scoff at it here.
My definitions were all consistent. If some nuance turns out to matter, we can address it when it does. Try saying something substantive. I claim that parasites with those pfcrt mutations are fitter when chloroquine is around. Do think my claim is true? Do you think it is a tautology?
Let’s talk species. Humans are destroying environment at fast pace. Will all other animals in the environment develop super brains by changing the rate of mutation and create some super phenotype which will help them attack Humans and destroy us all ? Pretty much every animal is more reproductively successful than humans so are all species more Fit than humans in our present environment ?
Steve Schaffner,
Oh come on Steve. You can’t even give a definition. You said it yourself, your “definitions” as if you want to keep changing from one to another. You seem afraid to pin yourself down to one position. Is the definition of fitness a statistical likelihood, or an ACTUAL physical property?
I can understand quite well why you refuse to take a side, and prefer to vacillate back and forth, but you can’t really expect to be taken seriously when all you want to do is throw a smokebomb to hide the relevant issue. Without one definition for fitness you are saying nothing.
Fitness is not genpotypes. Fitness is the property of phenotypes. Regaridng “tend”, man, you should know a little about a subject before debating it. Many aspects of biology and ecology are explained in terms of probabilites. A certain trait does not guarantee every single individual in which it is present will reproduce more. Smoke leads to lung cancer. That doesn’t mean every smoker will have lung cancer. It’s a statistical trend.
There you are building a straw man. Who said “ANY given environment”? Why would it be “any given environment”? How can an organism run fast, swim fast, fly fast, breath air, breath underwater, etc?
Here’s a wiki article on fitness. There are the definitions.
the bystander,
Interesting point. Obviously, we can’t get very far with this though, when the evolutionists keep wanting to equivocate about what they even mean by fitness. We don’t even know if fitness is a quality, or a statistical prediction. Steve and Joe and Keith have been checkmated into a corner, so now they want to claim that its both, or neither…
“You see, we can predict fitness, but fitness is a prediction, I mean, its a tendency, well, we can measure it, but its not really important that the models fit the measurement, but that its a probability, in a given environment that we can’t define, that well, look, its not about the individuals in the population, its about the population as a whole, but no, no, we look at the phenotype, but its not a phenotype…don’t you know what populations genetics is! Its that. Its cancer drugs! Get an education…”
Oh those silly creationists.