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JSM:

Anyway, I guess that's the last we'll hear from Will for a while. We all know he's too much of a chicken to admit when he's flat wrong.

This thread has quickly devolved into another prime example of the echo-chamber, circle-jerk mentality that predominates here. You all agree with each other that I'm wrong about something (although what that "something" is remains unclear), and you are enthusiastically engaged in congratulating one another on your glorious triumph. Classic stuff.

And yet no one has yet presented a single argument to contradict the obvious reality that only those are selected who successfully reproduce. EAllusion asserts that:

The fittest aren't those that survive, but rather those that have traits that are more functionally efficient at reproductive success compared against others in a population.

The Dude apparently (albeit tacitly) agrees with him.

So, I ask again, if not the simple fact of survival, what is the test whereby you establish fitness in a population?

William Schryver wrote:And yet no one has yet presented a single argument to contradict the obvious reality that only those are selected who successfully reproduce.

No, I did exactly that, and The Dude has outlined another refutation. The blind eagle chick in my scenario is still alive at this moment in time, and the normal chick has not yet reproduced. It could very well be that the blind chick will reproduce and the normal one will not -- we'd have to run the clock to know for these specific individuals. But we can talk about the relative probabilities of reproductive success for the chicks, which renders your assertion untrue.

So, I ask again, if not the simple fact of survival, what is the test whereby you establish fitness in a population?

Why should there be one test? There'd be many different ones. Following The Dude's and my examples, you could test eyesight and ejaculate volume in highly visual species that reproduce internally.

JohnStuartMill wrote:Anyway, I guess that's the last we'll hear from Will for a while. We all know he's too much of a chicken to admit when he's flat wrong.

He won't admit he's wrong. He can't see that he's wrong. But my mentioning penises and ejaculations has snared him into making another predictable remark:

WS wrote:This thread has quickly devolved into another prime example of the echo-chamber, circle-jerk mentality that predominates here.

The Dude wrote:

JohnStuartMill wrote:Anyway, I guess that's the last we'll hear from Will for a while. We all know he's too much of a chicken to admit when he's flat wrong.

He won't admit he's wrong. He can't see that he's wrong. But my mentioning penises and ejaculations has snared him into making another predictable remark:

WS wrote:This thread has quickly devolved into another prime example of the echo-chamber, circle-jerk mentality that predominates here.

In other words, you have no response to the question.

If not the simple fact of survival, what is the test whereby you establish fitness in a population?

The only place you can get away with such blatant displays of arrogant illogic is with your circle-jerk buddies here on this message board.

Or in a meeting of Darwinist ideologues.

JB,
Thank you for your responses. I think that maybe you are not the member I am gunning for. You clearly have recognized the issues and are dealing with them in the best way you can. I think you are going to be all right. Please give me any more insights you may have. I find them fascinating.

Are there any apologists out there?

William Schryver wrote:Or in a meeting of Darwinist ideologues.

Darwinist ideologues, also known as "actual scientists".

William Schryver wrote:In other words, you have no response to the question.

If not the simple fact of survival, what is the test whereby you establish fitness in a population?

Guess what, Will. The way you are equating fitness and survival in your question forces a tautology and I have already responded to your issue by pointing out that survival of the fittest is a dumbed-down metaphor for natural selection that isn't worth defending. I believe I said "ridicule it all you want if that's the best you can do." And you continue in the same rut.

A more accurate way is to say "survival of the fit enough," because a population is full of variation and many different creatures that make a certain cutoff will reproduce, not just some clones of the baddest he-man in the bunch. So asking for a "test" that proves which single genotype is the fittest simply shows you aren't thinking about real evolution.

This is entirely meaningless, of course, unless these traits actually result in reproductive success, regardless of what they conduce to, and regardless of the environmental context in which they attempt to reproduce.

Hmmm. Let's see.

No. It's quite meaningful. Traits that confer success have a statical propensity increase in proportion over time relative to the advantage they provide. It's a central insight that is just as much important for evolutionary algorithms used in engineering and computer science as it is applied in biology.

Here's natural selection in a nutshell:

1) There exists a population of replicating things with individuals varying in the traits they possess.
2) The traits in question are both heritable and confer different probabilities of reproductive success*

3) In each successive generation, traits that confer greater probabilities of reproductive success are likely to be found in greater proportion.

So to take a simple example of natural selection in action, when antibiotics are introduced into a population of bacteria those that have traits that provide resistance (given no overwhelming drawback) are more "fit" since they have a trait that will make it likely have reproductive success relative to their peers. All things being equal, their peers stand a certain % chance of antibiotic related death they lack. Hence, over successive generations we'd predict that this trait is likely to become more frequent in the population. Overtime, natural selection will shape this population to have antibiotic resistant traits it initially either lacked or only had in small proportion. This quite clearly isn't tautological. Since this is an easy case it's easy to look at the antibiotic resistance trait as defined here and conclude it was more fit regardless of what circumstances ultimately befall the bacteria who possessed it. We know the trait is more fit because we know it can negotiate an environment full of antibiotics better than those without can. In short, the antibiotic resistant bacteria is better adapted for an antibiotic laden environment, ergo selection will favor it.

In retrospect it seems real obvious, but this mechanism was only occasionally nipped at prior to Darwin and Wallace. They were the first to put on a convincing case that this mechanism has shaped the biodiversity we see to a significant extent by laying out the case for adaptation existing in nature.

Of course, what actually is fit in a given environmental context isn't always easy to know beforehand. The question of how we know a trait is adapted - how we distinguish between fitness and drift accounting for changes in the frequency of traits to the extent we can - is a relatively complicated one that goes beyond the scope of what needs to be established here. What's important for the claim made here is that it isn't assumed whatever survives is that which is the most fit anymore than we should assume whichever baseball team wins the game is the team best built to win games. This answers the tautology charge.


*Reproductive success can get tricky to define, but it means something close to having the greatest amount of viable offspring that will also competitively produce viable offspring.

Is it really possible that someone with at least average intelligence really doesn't get the point that has been so laboriously explained?

I think the concept that is tripping Will up is the ex post nature of most of our explanations for survival. If we're trying to explain how birds evolved, then we point to actual outcomes: although dinosaurs that had bony armor might have had a higher probability of survival from a Cretaceous standpoint, dinosaurs that had feathers actually survived to propagate their genes, so we know that feathers ended up conferring "fitness". Because a lot of the evidence for evolution is in the fossil record, a lot of the support for evolution consists of pointing to these actual events, and ignoring the ex ante survival probabilities that didn't pan out because of bottlenecking or abrupt environmental changes or whatever**. Will's problem is that he isn't separating the two.

**None of this is to say that ex ante survival probabilities can't be calculated in retrospect, but it is a lot harder, given the amount of knowledge of an ecosystem one needs to make survival predictions, and the paucity of the fossil record relative to studies of existing environments.