But I am at a loss to respond, since asakjing a question about 'natural selection, aka 'selection',and 'fitness' is exactly what I have been doing, wi8thout, as yet, receiving an answer.
The only question you asked in the the post I replied to was why someone thought you were attributing the industrial revolution to Darwin. everything else was just a string of assertions showing that you already know hat you think about various terms in biology even though you seem to have no idea what they actually mean.
What "bald assertion" would that be? I said that if 'selection', 'natural selection', and other terms lack empirical substance that they are meaningless, scientifically speaking. That isn't a "bald assertion". That's just a plain fact.
Except you didn't say that you said that you just made a whole string of assertions. Look back at that post and tell me where the questions were.
Hmm. So what I hear you telling me is that 'fitness' is not empirical science, i.e., evolutionary biology, but rather an arithmetical abstraction from the non-empirical world of mathematics.
I'm surprised that's what you heard since it clearly isn't what I said. What are 'post-hoc measures base on observed gene changes' if not empirical? How is it different from working out the trajectory of an object in motion from 2 point measurements of its location at given times, in what way is it less empirical? I admit it can be hard to survey the entire genetic complement of a population, but that doesn't make it not empirical just less exact.
See, I thought that the word for what you are describing was ecology.
So there is another whole are of Biology you know nothing about, imagine my surprise. Ecology is concerned with all the interactions of the many different organisms in a particular region. It is not concerned, except in evolutionary ecological studies, with the effect the environment has on the allele frequencies in a particular organisms population.
At any rate, it certainly seems to be an abstraction and not an empirical phenomenon. That is, it is a notion, not an actual entity. It belongs to philosophy, not science. Am I right?
No, you're not right. If I have two plated cultures of bacteria and introduce an antibiotic into one and measure the genetic frequency of a trait connected with drug resistance before and after in both cultures then how is that not an empirical measurement of the effect of the anitbiotic as an environmental factor interacting with the bacterial genotype? It certainly gets more complicated when you are dealing with large organisms out in the wild but it doesn't make the effects any more real.
Well, which is it? "Fitness" or fecundity? Mice are far more 'fecund', as in, 'prolific', than are, say, tigers. Are mice therefore 'fitter' than tigers?
Depends on the mouse, for the common house mouse answer should be obvious since I have never heard there was any of them going extinct while tiger populations are diminishing all over the place. In the modern world humans have made mice are much better fitted to take advantage of human created environments than tigers are.
Or are you saying that mouse "A" is "fitter" than mouse "B" because mouse "A" has produced more litters than mouse "B", which may just be because mouse "A" is a year older than mouse "B".
Well I could hardly be saying that since I said that genetic fitness was the mean of fecundity, so that clearly doesn't apply to one mouse. If mouse population 'A' had more offspring than population 'B', over a given time period in the same environment with both populations initially the same size, then it would be the genetically fitter population for that environment. Could you mess up the measurement? Sure. Maybe they have different breeding seasons and you mistakenly measure them during the breeding season of a particular population, but experiments are designed to minimalise such factors and it doesn't change the fact that the effects that are being imperfectly measured are perfectly real.
This concept of 'fitness' strikes me as analogous to counting the corpses after a battle as if that explained the origins of the weapons used.
The correct analogy would be to counting the number of soldiers in both armies before the battle and noting what weapons they have and then counting the number of survivors on each side after the battle, obviously counting the dead would work equally well for this last step. Would you not then be in a position to make some estimate of the likely outcome if a similar battle were to be subsequently fought?
I do not think that changes in numbers and changes in organisms are the same thing, you see.
ell that sounds very deep but makes no sense as far as I can see in the context of the discussion, are you now wanting to discuss the origin of novel traits? Or do you mean the changes in the number of organisms which is what would be being measured?
It would seem to me that the only way to make what happens to an organism into a function of what happens to its parent organism's genetic makeup is to insist that traits and organisms are the inevitable outcome of genetic determinism. If 'gene' does not equal 'trait', I do not see how you can treat them as if they were synonymous, or at least equivalent, and that is what you are doing here. It's a clear case of equivocation.
Its not a function of its parent organisms genetic makeup but of its own. But many traits are clearly genetically determined, to think otherwise is merely insane. Are all traits genetically deteremined, no nor do they need to be but the effect suctraits have on the genetic frequencies in the population is exactly the sort of statistical noise I described earlier. Gene can be taken as synonymous with 'heritable trait' without much danger, although as I said before there are potentially heritable epigentic factors.
If, OTOH, a gene is not tantamount to a trait, nor its molecular equivalent,
But there it certainly is. If a particular form of protein should b considered a trait, and it certainly should, then how do the different genes which code for different forms of that protein not represent distinct traits?
How does a gene encoding a mutant form of haemoglobin not represent the sickle cell trait?
And if 'selection' is not 'gene-dependent', then what you've just said here makes no sense.
But I have very clearly said that it is 'gene-dependent'
Unless you can stipulate what it means, I'm free to ask you if it means this, that, or the other.
Indeed, but the choice you chose seems to show no grasp at all of what it actually means, so why persist in making little better than guesses at meaning?
TTFN,
WK
Edited by Admin, : Fix quoting.
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