There is a pretty interesting discussion going on in Noyau regarding the many definitions of “fitness” in evolutionary biology. It would be a shame for it to be lost in that particular venue here at TSZ. At the risk of being censored by the admins for posting too many OPs in one month I thought I’d start this thread.
Here’s my take so far:
Allan Miller was charged by phoodoo with resorting to different definitions of fitness. Allan denied the charge and when asked for a definition of fitness Allan provided one. Allan later stated that his definition only properly applied to asexual species.
Others chimed in to say that the definition of fitness depends on the context, which hardly seems to contradict what phoodoo was saying.
My own position is that fitness has its definition within a particular mathematical framework. My position is also that fitness can be defined generically but that such a definition is tautological. Special definitions of fitness are required to make the concept testable.
Here’s hoping we can move the discussion about fitness out of Noyau.
Are people seriously continuing to argue that there is NO sense in which some ‘varieties’ do better or worse, and increase or decrease in frequency in the population as a consequence? That is a pathetically obtuse line of argumentation. The only possibilities are increase, decrease or stay the same. Having decided the first 2 don’t happen, does every frequency stay the same, then? Merry Christmas, oddballs.
That the fittest should survive over not so fit and therefore more likely to reproduce…have offspring…It only works in speculative, population genetics…
It works pretty well in explaining why your garden tends to fill up with weeds.
Which is precisely why fitness is such a meaningless and circular concept. If it survives it is fit, so there is no point in ever asking do the fittest survive! That is what you call fit!
Its easier to do experiments, than to think clearly about it. See what survives, then declare that as fit. There is no need to think clearly about it.
You mean like survivors survive?
No, I am arguing that those that do better are called fit, and that calling things that do better a consequence of things doing better is a pretty funny line.
We have been over this more than once…
Out of the 120 000 of fertilized eggs of green frog only 2 survive… Based on what are we to assume that the 2 were the fittest ones? Because they survived?
Yes, you’re right, we have been over this more than once. Including the question you just asked.
What on earth makes you so sure that evolutionary biologists assert that the 2 fittest of the 20,000 will survive? Just because Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig thinks that that’s what they assert? He’s not a reliable source on that.
In fact, if all fitness differences are viability differences, and the 2 fittest of the 20,000 eggs have fitnesses 10% greater than the average of the rest, the probability that a particular one of them survives would be:
1.1 / (2 x 1.1 + 19,998 x 1) = 0.0000549994
(so about 10% greater than they would be if they were exactly as fit as the others, in which case the probability that a particular one of them survives would be 1/20000 or 0.00005).
Has it ever occurred to you that if we observe that, on average over many such individuals, that individuals with red spots in a population have a 10% greater chance of surviving and thus end up producing 10% more offspring, that we might want to know what would happen if this situation continued? And we might want to know how quickly an allele that causes that would spread?
And that if we wanted to calculate that, we’d have to use the number 1.1 as the relative contribution of those individuals to the next generation, compared to the others? And then we’d want to call that something when we used the number in the calculation. Such as maybe “fitness”?
Oops, was reading too fast and mistook 120,000 as 20,000. But the point should be clear either way.
How about if we say that “fitness” is a measure of likelihood of survival, and that the most “fit” are generally very very very slightly more likely to survive than the average? In the real world, therefore, the fittest are only a tiny bit more likely to survive. The large majority of them do NOT survive to reproduce.
The world’s best poker players quite often lose to mediocre players. That doesn’t mean the mediocre players are “better”, it means that the fall of the cards lies outside the skill of the players.
If the 2 surviving frogs are not the fittest, as per your own admission based on your sources and not Loennig’s, how effective natural selection really is?
Based on what should I believe that natural selection is not a random process then? Or should I rather believe what Loennig quoted by Cuenot?
“… natural selection is nothing but blind mortality which selects nothing at all…”
Loenning thinks this statement by Cuenot is extreme…but I have my doubts after your latest admission about fitness and impotence of natural selection…
Well, if the definition of fit is those that are slightly more apt to exist, and then you measure which are more slightly apt to exist, and call them fit, then I guess your theory will be correct, ALWAYS!
To use your analogy, if the best poker players are those that win the most, and you test this theory by seeing who wins the most and then calling them best, I guess your theory could never be wrong.
If they stop winning the most, they aren’t still called the best poker players, instead we just rename the ones who are winning the most as the best now.
Can the circularity of such reasoning be any more clear than this? Why ever ask the question, “Do the best poker players win the most?” if the definition of the best poker players are those who win the most?
And, if anyone finds this exchange somewhat reminiscent of arguments in previous threads, they need only go back to the thread most of the mutations to see that all this ground has been thoroughly trampled before, and nothing learned, apparently.
Here is me making the same points I just made, in response to the same example.
Groundhog day, I guess.
Well if the definition of the fast runners is those that run at slightly higher velocities, and then you measure which are running at slightly higher velocities, and call those the fast runners, then I guess your theory will be correct, ALWAYS!
According to phoodoo, we should stop all the runs at the olympics, because we already know who’s going to win: It’ll be the fast runners. It’s unfalsifiable!
That is literally how utterly fucking void in the skull his objection is.
The creotard parade keeps rolling
So who would ever ask the question, “Do the fastest runners have the highest velocity?”
Evolutionists, that’s who!
Do the best poker players always win the most on average Rum?
Well, most certainly, how could they not??
No, why would they ask that? Do you have examples of “evolutionists” asking that question? Please quote them here.
I agree. I’m glad you are finally seeing that fitness is a logical and coherent concept, just like being better at running, playing poker and so on.
When big-time gamblers want to get an advantage in gambling on horse-races, why do they try to send spies to watch the horses’ training runs?
Waste of their time?
“Is survival of the fittest true?
There.
No, once again, you don’t understand the metrics of measuring one iota. If being better at poker equates to winning, then we never need to know if the best poker players win on average. Its a pointless question giving the definition of better.
HOWEVER, if the question becomes different, like perhaps, “Do the bravest poker players win?” Or “Do the most conservative players win the most?” Or, “Do the players who bet the most win the most?” “or “Are the tallest poker players the best?”, then we at least have the possibility of being profound.
These are all actual, legitimate questions. These are questions which can be measured, and which also can have a yes or no answer. Your nonsensical concepts of fitness, or “the best” can never be measured and answered, except in the affirmative. They can never be refuted, and they tell you nothing. “Do the best players win?” when best means the ones who win. Or, “Do the fastest runners win?” when the definition of winning is being the fastest.
The fact that you can’t understand this distinction, that to you its all the same thing. That, you are wholly incapable of seeing the stupidity circularity of your fitness concept, shows just how lost you are when it comes to the problem.
You aren’t smart enough to understand that in order to measure if something is true or not, you can’t not have as your measurement, the very thing that defines the affirmation of the question.
Are the bluest things bluest? Is the fastest the fastest? Are the best survivors the best survivors? Are small things smaller than larger things? Do the best poker players win the most money? Is Rumraket the biggest dope?
Absolutely. And since the analogy in poker to fitness is winning, when we ask whether birds with 1 centimeter longer wings survive better, it is closely analogous to your asking whether taller poker players are better.
Glad that is settled and that you agree that questions about whether particular phenotypes affect fitness “have the possibility of being profound”.
I have no idea why you would think that, nor why you would think it untestable.
Creationists can’t even say anything original. See it on ENV, regurgitate on evolutionist site of your choosing, ignore responses, do it again.
It’s precisely because ‘what survived’ is NOT the definition of ‘fitter’ that this is irrelevant. I produce billions of gametes a year. Only 3 survived. Although there is something of a contest among sperm – poor swimmers will evidently be outcompeted – no-one would say it was the fittest 3 of those billions that survived, except in the lead-headed misunderstandings of certain vocal Creationists.
Then you acknowledge it is not possible to measure the fitness of genotypes than right?
Joe Felsenstein,
Furthermore, asking if “survival of the fittest” is true or not is meaningless, right?
Yes, this is the claim you often try to make Allan. And yet you can not give any reason why that is so.
If we acknowledge that fittest means the best survivors over time (which of course you try to not admit ANYTHING about the definition of fitness, so you don’t have to answer questions about it), and since everyone else besides you now seems willing to concede that, than J Mac’s conclusion is inevitable.
Is that a quote? Of whom?
Once again, I understand it really well and you’re just being obtuse because of your cognitive bias.
Get it under control. I know me even saying this just makes you feel even more prideful and angry. But really, get your emotions under control. We can’t have a conversation when you are ruled entirely and thoroughly by some underlying emotional content.
Please try to get it under control. You are a human being, you should be able to do this.
I agree, the question is pointless. Who first asked it, and why?
I agree.
These are all actual, legitimate questions. These are questions about things which can be measured, and which also can have a yes or no answer.
Sure it can, you just conceded that it can. Reproductive success (what is just called fitness) is the measure of success in evolution, just as winning games is the measure of success in poker. And we can measure the contributions to success in evolution, just as we can in poker.
Do tall organisms reproduce more? Do tall players win more?
Do strong organisms reproduce more? Do strong players win more?
Do conservative organisms reproduce more? Do conservative playstyles win more?
But we just agreed “do the best players win more?” is an uninteresting question in poker, just as “do the most fit organisms reproduce more?” is an uninteresting question in evolution.
But that doesn’t mean fitness (the measure of reproductive success) is an incoherent concept, just as winning in poker is not an incoherent concept.
The fact that you CAN ask nonsensical questions about poker-winners, does not mean ALL questions you can ask about poker-winners are nonsensical.
In the same way, the fact that you CAN ask nonsensical questions about “evolution winners”, does not mean ALL questions you can ask about “evolution winners” are nonsensical.
Again, you gave good examples of sensible questions. What features of poker-players contributes to them winning more? What strategies employed work best? Does wearing sunglasses give an advantage? Does being loud and emotional give an advantage?
We can answer such questions by looking at lots of poker games and deriving average success rates of “poker players wearing sunglasses”, or “poker players playing conservatively”.
In the same way we can answer such questions about the contributions of behaviors and traits, to the reproductive success of organisms in evolution.
We look at lots of individual organisms and see their average reproductive rates. What is the average reproductive success of dark fur mice vs bright fur mice? What is the average reproductive success of stronger vs weaker mice?
The principles are the same. Look at the players with particular “traits” when they play and see how often they win.
Just as in poker, so in biology there are many contributing factors. You need to look at lots and lots of poker games to get an idea about whether wearing sunglasses positively contributes to winning, because there are usually many factors in play simultaneously. It might even be situational.
I agree, those are tautologies. That does not mean we can’t determine what factors contribute to being better players, or faster runners. It does not mean the concept of “fast runner” is incoherent. It just means we can construct nonsensical questions about the concept, not that the concept of being a good player, or a fast runner, is itself nonsensical.
You are confusing the concept of fitness itself, with asking a nonsensical question ABOUT fitness.
Just as you can ask a nonsensical question about poker-winners (“Do the best players win?”), does not mean the concept of being a good poker player is itself nonsensical.
The fact that you are confusing the concept of fitness, with a question asked ABOUT the concept of fitness, shows just how lost you are when it comes to the problem.
I believe I am in fact both smart enough to understand that, AND that I am also so much less biased than you that I can consistently and recurrently explain to you what the problem is, while you will remain pridefully incapable of reflecting sensibly on this subject. Even the mere fact that I respond to you with disagreement will be enough for you to feel a need to contradict me. You will not even have really read this post, you will have fist of all detected the fact of my disagreement, then entered into some debilitating state of mind where you quickly scan through the post looking for objectionable matter, and then post an intensely idiotic reply in haste and anger.
And I predict whatever response you give to my post here will be no exception: You manifest another instance of a debilitating cognitive bias that permeates your entire output on the subject of biological evolution and makes you completely unable to speak coherently about it.
You can overcome it, but it requires the willingness of you to do so. You are a human being, not just an instinctive biological machine. Please spend some time looking inwards and realize that you are not being rational on this. Thank you.
Are you incapable of ever overcoming your cognitive biases?
Is it the 10% greater chance of surviving that is known as natural selection?
Because I’d really like to know if you are now admitting that natural selection is probabilistic after previously denying it.
Chance-based evolution. Maybe the creationists are on to something.
Can’t that be said of any tautology though?
Rumraket must be an unmarried bachelor.
Here’s a question then: is it that people think that there is NO relationship between alleles and their success or failure, or that there is no way in which that relationship can be quantified, even approximately?
Note how Joe is resorting to special definitions of fitness in order to make it testable, just as I said.
Possibly, though I’m not aware of any concept that can only be expressed tautologously.
It all boils down to one thing which you have never, ever attempted to answered straightforwardly:
Is there or isn’t there a strong element of randomness in natural selection?
You are doing the same thing here that you’ve tried to do to Lonning; avoid the obvious conclusions, because either way is bad for your Darwinian faith;
1.If there is not randomness in natural selection, then natural selection is simply ineffective or impotent as in the examples I have quoted including green frog:
“Out of 120,000 fertilized eggs of the green frog only two individuals survive. Are we to conclude that these two frogs out of 120,000 were selected by nature because they were the fittest ones; or rather — as Cuenot said — that natural selection is nothing but blind mortality which selects nothing at all?
Similar questions may be raised for the 700 billion spores of Lycoperdon, the 114 million eggs multiplied with the number of spawning seasons of the American oyster, for the 28 million eggs of salmon and so on. King Solomon wrote around 1000 BC: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,…but time and chance happeneth to all of them” (KJV 1611).
If only a few out of millions and even billions of individuals are to survive and reproduce, then there is some difficulty believing that it should really be the fittest who would do so. Strongly different abilities and varying environmental conditions can turn up during different phases of ontogenesis. Hiding places of predator and prey, the distances between them, local differences of biotopes and geographical circumstances, weather conditions and microclimates all belong to the repertoire of infinitely varying parameters. Coincidences, accidents, and chance occurrences are strongly significant in the lives of all individuals and species. Moreover, the effects of modifications, which are non-heritable by definition, may be much more powerful than the effects of mutations which have only “slight or even invisible effects on the phenotype” (Mayr 1970, p. 169, similarly 1976/1997; see also Dawkins, 1995, 1998), specifying that kind of mutational effects most strongly favored for natural selection and evolution by the neo-Darwinian school. Confronting the enormous numbers of descendants and the never-ending changes of various environmental parameters, it seems to be much more probable that instead of the very rare “fittest” of the mutants or recombinants, the average ones will survive and reproduce.
2. If there is a strong element of randomness in natural selection, as in the many examples I quoted, then the consequence of it is that the mechanism of evolution Darwinists are trying to sell based on 2 random mechanisms is unlikely to find functional targets…
So, your faith has to be blind either way and all you can do is speculated with numbers that have no real meaning when compared with the facts and the numbers. This is what happens when people like you “have never been out in the woods” to check out the real world and not just do the speculations with numbers of your imagination…
Groundhog day? This is worst! This is a delusion …
What do you mean by success and failure, increase or decrease in frequency in the population? That can happen by drift alone. Beneficial alleles can be lost and deleterious alleles can be fixed. What is the “fitness” of such alleles?
Rumraket,
Just hold on there bucko. You have to learn to control your emotions man. You are wigging out, it must be your invested worldview or something. Get a grip man, have you had your meds? Count to ten, try to take a deep breath, wipe the spittle off your chin, find your happy place.
Because you see, now we have a whole other issue. The question now becomes ARE THERE traits which universally give certain organisms a reproductive advantage? Not fitness, remember, because fitness means a reproductive advantage, try to keep that in your steaming head. But that’s a problem, see. Because first off we have no frickin clue, because its an impossible study to do, to see what traits cause organisms to reproduce. You can bullshit tall you want about bacteria in a dish, but that doesn’t tell us what traits, when, why how, or anything. And if it comes down to it, and all we can do is count, then we have to count everything, and that means male pattern baldness, tongue rolling, one nostril bigger than the other, widows peaks, and every other thing you can think of.
You will never know if its the shape of the fingernail, the speed which one can run, the backgammon prowess, or the love of mobile homes. You will, never ever ever be able to know. It maybe be easier to do experiments on it, than to think clearly about it, but its impossible to ever know because EVERY SINGLE genotype is different. Every time you remix, and reboot the environment, you got a new answer.
J-Mac,
The trait of lucky never gets measured by evolutionists. So they pretend it doesn’t matter.
TSZ is my happy place. It makes me laugh.
Alleles don’t reproduce, how many times have you been told this?
Unless one is delusional….
No. Simply, whether a particular allele instance is copied or not. It leads to frequency change, but that’s not the criterion.
Yes it can, but I have to give that a big ‘so what?’. If there is a relationship, it does not have to a deterministic relationship to be a relationship. An allele’s effects can still correlate with offspring numbers, without raising them in every body.
When you use the terms beneficial and detrimental there, what do you mean, if you aren’t making a statement about fitness?
phoodoo is still banging on about alleles not reproducing. Only whole genomes reproduce, not any part of them. I can only point and laugh.
Sheer Dumb Luck that Darwinists worship so much can’t be measured…neither can the effects of her invisible, creative, beyond any human intelligence, powers…and yet they gotta exist…if you are a Darwinist…No need to mention the power of blind faith…that has gotta exist too…
They can …unless they are eliminated by random events in nature…weather, predators, environmental influence etc. in other words the dark side of dumb luck…natural selection can’t save them…unless you choose to believe it…
Natural selection cannot save every organism from every calamity, no. That would, indeed, seem to be a logical impossibility, particularly in inter-organism relations. If you can find anyone who said it did, I’d be grateful for a reference, thanks.
You have disagreed with Joe Felsenstein in some aspects of randomness in natural selection…What was it?
ETA: You have followed the threads with me and Joe exchanges…There are references there to countless, inescapable elements of random eliminations of progeny…
So here’s what we have so far:
1) Because NS can be expressed tautologously, it doesn’t happen.
2) Because NS can be opposed or reinforced by stochastic effects, it doesn’t happen.
3) Because genomic segments are replicated as part of a whole, they cannot increase or decrease in frequency.
4) Because you may not know in advance which alleles confer the higher fitnesses, none do.
Is that a fair summary of the various ‘anti-fitness’ positions?
That Joe and I might have slightly different preferences for representing the ‘random’ part of evolution does not in any way mean that either of us thinks those ‘random’ losses do not occur. As my gametes example showed, there is a strong element of randomness; that does not mean that ‘random’ losses are all that happen.
If you see a difference between Joe and I, I’d recommend that your default position should be to side with him, but in this instance the difference is, I think, in your imagination.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitness/
Fine. You have also conceded that not only the fittest survive, right? Just like in the case of 120 000 of fertilized eggs of green frog when only 2 survive…