Re: CHAT: Religion, Philosophy & Politics

On Thu, 4 May 2000, Ed Heil wrote:

> I'm not impressed by that site's explanations.  I think that "survival
> of the fittest" is a tautology, but that there's more to the theory
> than that one phrase.  And that's more or less what the site tries to
> say, except that it phrases it as an explication of the word
> "fittest."
EXACTLY!  I can give an explication of current mainstream Evolutionary
theory without having to refer to "fitness" as it is generally used.


1:  Species change, disappear, or appear over time.  This is the observed
phenomenon.

2:  Some of this change is due to differential rates of success in
reproduction due to phenotypic differences in interaction with the
environment.

2a: Some differentials in reproductive success are PURELY STOCHASTIC!

3:  When sufficient phenotypic differences add up (transmitted via
genotypic variance AND some currently ill-understood epigenic
mechanisms--methylation can be inherited!), one can say that a new species
has emerged.  "Sufficient" has not been stringently defined but is more a
rule of thumb (and "unable to interbreed" presumes that the organism can
have sex in the first place, therefore, it cannot be a universal principle).

3a: Isolated, small populations can magnify the effect of a variation,
since it could either have an unusually high effect upon reproductive
success or simply be far more initially common than in larger populations
due to "sampling" artifacts.

4:  Even given all the above, it is possible for phenotypic and genotypic
drift to occur without pressure upon reproductive success, simply due to
"n-dimensional random walk" effects, which can mathematically be shown to
have a _post hoc_ "direction" without _pre hoc_ design.



"Survival of the fittest" is a out-dated term that should be relegated to
the same category as "phlogiston" and "aether".