"I can come up with a story about why these should or might matter to reproductive
success and through it to frequency change, and because I can describe some mechanism, my
story will be built up around that mechanism."
I can come up with a story about why these should or might matter to
reproductive success, and through it to frequency change, and because I can
describe some mechanism..... I can carry out experiments, and observational
studies, in the well established traditions of the field biologist, ethologist,
biological anthropologist, etc., to confirm the viability of that theory, and
thereby increase my confidence that I have correctly identified the crucial way
in which the organisms under my study fit their environment. And when I do so,
I will not sweep under the rug all the background knowledge (in terms of
comparisons with other species and/or engineering principles) that led to the
initial hypothesis.
The connection to empirical field research is critical. The pure-math approach is viable in its self-contained world (and I have read enough early statistics work, including Fischer, to deeply appreciate that world), but it mentally disconnects those discussing the topic from the wild world in which the organisms live. Yes, obviously everything you say about regressions is true, but the question for Darwin wasn't whether or not animals change over time; due to fossil evidence, the scientific community at large already agreed that species change. The question was WHY do certain traits become more prominent in future generations. The regression, at best, shows which traits are corresponding to reproductive success ("at best", because of all the well understood challenges of ascribing causality to that math, which we don't need to rehash in this setting). Testing the hypothesis in the field can confirm (or refute) our intuitive notions (our stories) regarding why certain traits
should be favored over others, and that includes sometimes refuting the causality a researcher wishes to imply by displaying a very pretty regression analysis.
Nick... why did you reopen this conversation after EricS nodded sagely at my
prior post? You really, really don't know how to take a win.
Also, why the hell do you keep sending your old papers? If there is a warm body
willing to read anything, you should be sending out the draft manuscript!
EricS... if you are willing to read anything, I would greatly value your
reading some of the book-in-progress, which incorporates exactly the papers
Nick keeps sending you... but... as an added benefit, the book draft is more
focused on the overall argument, and less stuck to 40-60 year old literature. I
would happily send you the current draft, and direct you to the parts
corresponding to the papers Nick recently shared, if you would be willing to
take a look.
Best,
Eric
-
<mailto:[email protected]>
On Tue, Apr 7, 2026 at 10:35 PM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Nick, you are a sundew.
Was that a metaphor? Maybe more of a taxonomic classification.
There are two things at work here, both of which I will fail to impact by
whatever I write below:
1. A large part of the mismatch is the degree to which reading you is, for
me, like reading a literal text translation into contemporary English of
something written in the 5th century. There were plenty of priests at that
time, as smart as anybody alive today, who would have insisted that things they
said were meaningful. But knowing they would say it, and that they were smart,
doesn’t enable me to see it that way. Nothing I write will make that the
source of that mismatch visible to you, for the simple reason that the one
thing none of us can see is the back of his own head. I no more than you.
2. A lot of this is about what different people feel like thinking about.
Nothing I can say below will have any effect on what you feel like thinking
about. So your discourse will continue unrefracted, like neutrinos or dark
matter, along its present course. And that’s, of course, COMPLETELY FINE. If
that weren’t the point of freedom, what would be?
All this I know. I’ll annoy the list and break my own word anyway, in the
hope that whatever I leave in the record of the list was as good an effort as I
could make to say something that seems coherent and correct to me, now and
later if I ever see it again.
I’ll also note that the chatbot’s summary of my position is incorrect in
its points 2 and 3. But that’s not a big deal either. The bots prioritize, in
this order: 1) gracefulness; 2) inclusiveness of coverage of their inputs, if
that is convenient; and 3) semantic coherence, if they get lucky and it works
out that way. It broke a bit at 2 (inclusiveness, since I never said I think
statistics is complete and mechanistic analysis non-contributing), and
coherence at a meaning level starts off already impaired in that way. The
chatbot’s point 3 is just flatly wrong. But whatever; it’s fine. We know they
do that, and we make allowances.
All the same, the chatbot’s synopsis layer is fine to work within — a lot
more graceful than my writing — and your sending it is good faith.
So, then, what?: What’s at issue in all this back-and-forth?:
1. What can you vaguely wave around at, and what do you need to mean
something fairly definite about?
1.a. If the job is to account for changes in the frequency-of-attestation
of features in some population, then their relative rates of change through
reproductive generations is the brute mechanics producing those changes. I
think if we believe in non-hallucinatory observation of populations, we are
stuck with this much. You don’t get to choose this, or to fudge it, or to hem
and haw and waffle and dart into the fog. You have to commit to something.
NOTE HERE PLEASE that I explicitly used a very general, observational-type term
that I did not define — “rates of change through reproductive generations” —
and I DID NOT USE SOME JARGON-TERM (such as “reproductive success”, which I
also didn’t define), because if one has to treat this part 1.a carefully, then
one can’t just waffle around in informal English. (Unless you _want_ the
conversation to be incapable of ever resolving by going in some definite
direction….) It’s a pity that Fisher was such a jerk, while Sewall
Wright was, by all accounts, a complete gentleman his whole life. But
Wright wasn’t a statistician, and neither were the others working at the
lead-in to the 1930s. And the way the rest of them were trying to describe
these things could have gone around in circles for centuries more. So, jerk or
no jerk, and whatever the other limitations of his method, Fisher cut out the
incoherence and set down some methods that enabled the field to be definite
about how it was quantifying various rates of change from observations, and
thus to make commitments about what its causal models were hoped to account
for. That’s why I keep coming back to him. There is a specific piece of this
that involves defining the observable topics for scientific inquiry, and any
possibility of meaning for any other elements is contingent on doing that first
one coherently.
1a.i: Now clearly, the frequency of attestation of a feature in a
population can change by a variety of processes, some of which you want to
attach to individuals and others to population states (all of these, —
obviously — in context of other environment boundary-condition contexts), some
of which you expect might be explicable in terms of parent properties, and
others of which you don’t think should be predictable at all within this scope
(sampling noise). This is why you don’t get to just offhand-conflate change in
frequency of attestation of features with “reproductive success”, unless you
want people to blow you off. You need to define what you are going to mean by
“a contribution from `reproductive success’ “, and other contributions from
other things (mutation, environment-dependent plasticity in how the feature
expresses, novel functional aspects of what the feature _is_, still sampling
noise, and on and on). “Reproductive success” itself might get decomposed
into attributes sensibly attachable to an organism and others that would
not make sense if attached in that way (maybe they only make sense if attached
to the interaction of mating pairs of organisms). This bullet-point-here
(1.a.i) is the one behind my remark to Frank that “reproductive success” is
only one component of change in frequency of attestation, because I know this
will be obvious and second-nature to him. It will also be obvious to him that
a decomposition of a total-change statistic into different components can be
checked for being well-defined, while at the same time there may be some
conventional choices in how the decomposition is done, and one can debate
whether they were good or poor choices.
1.a.ii: Do you understand that _I really don’t care_ what you call these
things, as long as you will tell me what you are using and then stay with it.
If you don’t like that Fisher called a certain component “fitness”, then You do
You. I don’t care. What I do care about is that the quantity we are talking
about has mechanical roles that we don’t get to dictate, and so we are bound by
those.
1.b. After we accept that we are bound by 1.a., everything else is up to us
in what we think the explanatory problem is. Here, I think, is where you want
to claim there is a there there for a certain point of view, and I am not
moved. We have two examples: Your parable of the shirts below is one.
Similar is EricC’s history-anchored characterization of the Parrots and Large
Ground Finches et alia, which he began with the sentence opening: Fitness = How
well the organism fits the environment…. Now, if you asked me (which you
didn’t) how I would summarize the content of those passages, in operational
language that I find meaningful, my summary would be: I can come up with a
story about why these should or might matter to reproductive success and
through it to frequency change, and because I can describe some mechanism, my
story will be built up around that mechanism. Okay. If you want there to be a
term “fitness” that unpacks to these sorts of “I can come up with a
story….” passages, then that choice will allow you to make statements like: "the
amount of money made by the shirt-wearer is just not what is meant by the fit of the shirt”
(Nick, through the parable); or "We expect fitness to predict survival (to reproductive
age) and reproductive success, but there is no guarantee that it does in any particular case”
(EricC, with not quite the same meaning, and a meaning that admits an interpretation much more
compatible with Fisher’s statistical decomposition). Since EricC was not so specific that I
know what he meant, let me keep the tar brush away from him. He could have meant (and his
"Fitness = How well the organism fits” would be consistent with having meant) that “I had
a story that it should matter, but it turns out not to have mattered as I expected”, but he
could also just have been referring to the difference between a single stochastic trajectory
and the average over a distribution of such trajectories, which would be
totally normal, or that the Price equation contains additional terms beyond
Fisher’s covariance, which would also be normal. But Nick, insofar as he will
ever hold still on a meaning if it looks like he is about to be held
responsible for it, does seem to mean “I had a story that it (this or that
fashion element of shirt measure) would show up in reproductive success
(wealth), but it didn’t.”
1.b.i: Now, you are welcome to try to come up with a term that unpacks to “I
can come up with a story for why….”, so that you can make such sentences. But I
won’t join you in doing that. “I can come up with a story for why…" sounds to
me like a hypothesis, which has the great holy virtue that it can be wrong. To try
to take the same thing and make it the foundation for a definition looks to me like
running headlong into the brambles. Please go ahead, but I will stay here.
1.b.ii: The fact that the chatbot has re-glossed one of the senses you want for
a term “fitness” as “adaptational adequacy”, which you hate, should be informative.
I told you in an earlier email that all these terms, “fitness”, “adaptation”, etc.,
are not in any sense interchangeable for me. I can unpack “adaptation” on its own
with measures of deviation of a realized outcome from some null hypothesis. (And I
do formalize it that way.) That leaves the poor word “adequacy” hanging out there
exposed, where all can see that you haven’t said anything about how you will assess
what is adequate and what is not. Because, of course, there is either the fact that
it shows evidence of producing frequency change through reproductive success, which
is (I say) the hypothesis we wish to test, and (you say) is this disappointing
tautology, or else there is some other meaning like "Nick finds this _so_
compelling”, which I don’t think works for definitions.
1.c: The various sub-points of 1.b are harped on to argue that hypotheses and
definitions are not interchangeable. _Of course_, I am not averse to all sorts of
pattern recognition, classification, abstraction, etc. In my lexicon: An
“abstraction" never violates the instances _of which it is a classification_.
So first get straight what features do result in changes in their own frequencies,
what empirical evidence you have for that, and how they do so. That will remain
correct after you classify cases, if it was correct before you did the
classification. If you can find more general patterns in the relations that lead to
feature-frequency change, then great; add to the interpretive richness of
evolutionary theory.
So does this help?
I’ll give you one last example of what I mean when I say that you write
things that sound 5th-century to me, and then explain what I think a modern
could put in its place that wouldn’t sound that way.
A few days ago, you wrote "Well, if we do believe that the relative success of
every genetic type of organism is systematic then it has a cause.” In informal speech, I
can go along with this, when we are broadly in agreement. But to write that after you
have just written things like "The essence of D's theory is that success causes
fitness, and that fitness causes success.”, I know there is going to be a big mess
because you haven’t said what you want “cause” to mean, and are likely to run off into
the fog if I try to pin you down about it. So that’s where you sound like a Scholastic,
or a pre-Leibnizian, responding to the forms of sentences without being serious about the
need for a semantic grounding.
Here is what I would say Glymour, Pearl, and others would put in place of
your sentence about “… it has a cause.” Rather: “This certain pattern of
systematic correlations, including the impacts upon them of changes in
environmental conditions (Pearl’s “DO” operator) is eligible to be _what we
mean by_ `cause' for this class of problems.”
I didn’t go in thinking “cause” was just a term I could use. Thus, when
you toss it off in a sentence about how two other things that you also haven’t
defined cause each other (even in a virtuous feedback), not only can I not
attach a meaning to the terms in the sentence; I can’t even tell what kind of a
sentence it is supposed to be.
All best,
Eric
On Apr 8, 2026, at 5:24, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
DES, et al.,
I have called in george as a mediator:
Here is my prompt:
*/George, I need your help with communication. I am corresponding with a
mathematician, complexity theorist, mathematics-of-life guy, who says he's
unable to understand my point of view. He is a very bright guy, so this is
embarrassing to me. I think my view on the relation between fitness and natural
selection is at LEAST cognizable. Can you please play the role of mediator
here, stating the two positions and then finding points of agreement and
articulating real points of disagreement./*
Here is his reply
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/*Let me try to restate both positions, then separate agreement from
disagreement.*/
/*DES, your position (as I understand it) is that evolutionary theory
already has a clear and effective framework for dealing with selection. We can
identify traits, observe changes in their frequencies, and use statistical
tools to analyze those changes. In that framework, “fitness” functions as a
quantitative characterization of differential reproductive success (or closely
related model variables). It is not intended to name a single underlying causal
essence, and explanation proceeds through ordinary empirical and statistical
work linking variation, context, and outcomes.*/
/*NST, your position is that this framework, while valid, leaves out
something essential if “fitness” is identified with reproductive success. You
want to distinguish between (i) the fact that some organisms leave more
offspring and (ii) the organism–environment relations that tend to produce that
outcome. For that second notion, we can use the placeholder adaptational
adequacy. Your concern is that if fitness is defined only in terms of realized
reproductive success, then evolutionary theory lacks an independently
characterized concept for those relations and risks becoming purely
retrospective.*/
/*Crucially, NST’s view is not that this second notion is mysterious or
inaccessible. It is studied through established biological methods — especially
comparative approaches that examine the form, behavior, and physiology of
organisms in relation to their environments across cases. By identifying
recurring patterns in how particular traits function in particular contexts,
these methods aim to build a body of knowledge about which kinds of
organism–environment relations tend to promote success. On this view,
adaptational adequacy is not a single formal variable, but a structured
empirical domain that supports informed expectations in new cases.*/
/*With that clarification, there is substantial agreement:*/
* /*Both of you accept that differential reproductive success can be
measured and analyzed rigorously. */
* /*Both of you accept that explanation requires empirical investigation
of traits in context. */
* /*Both of you accept that there is no single simple causal essence
underlying all cases of success. */
/*The real disagreements are these:*/
1. /*Meaning of “fitness”
DES uses it as a statistical characterization of reproductive success.
NST holds that this collapses a distinction and leaves no term for the
organism–environment relations that may explain success. */
2. /*Role of comparative biological knowledge
DES treats the statistical framework as sufficient for evolutionary
explanation.
NST holds that comparative and functional studies provide an
additional, indispensable layer: they identify patterns of adaptational
adequacy that are not captured by outcome measures alone. */
3. /*Prediction vs. retrospection
DES is satisfied with explanation grounded in analysis of observed
outcomes.
NST emphasizes that biology also develops expectations about new
systems by drawing on accumulated knowledge of how organisms interact with
environments. */
/*A possible way forward is to keep these roles distinct. “Reproductive
success” (and its statistical representations) can remain the outcome variable
analyzed by population genetics. At the same time, comparative and functional
biology can be recognized as developing knowledge of organism–environment
relations — NST’s adaptational adequacy — that help explain and sometimes
anticipate those outcomes.*/
/*Framed this way, the statistical framework remains intact, while NST’s
point is preserved: evolutionary explanation involves not only measuring
success, but also building a body of knowledge about the kinds of relations
that tend to produce it.*/
*
*
I would contest George's mediation on one point. Words cannot be dragged
from their ordinary language meanings too far or too fast without creating
mischief. Everybody knows that the fit of a shirt has something to do with how
it sits on the body, and while a man with good fitting shirts may make more
money than a man with ill-fitting shirts, the amount of money made by the
shirt-wearer is just not what is meant by the fit of the shirt. I can imagine
all sorts of well fitting shirts that the wearing of which would not make me
wealthy. I can also imagine poorly fitting shirts that might make me rich. As
long as I can even imagine such combinations, shirtfit does not mean wealthy.
I think that this is where you all will find me most irritating. I /*should*/ be
willing to accept George's ugly neologism, "adaptational adequacy", and concede
fitnes to the enumerable contexts in which reproductive success is found. I am not! That
I continue to be irritating in this way should not hide the fact that we seem to agree on
almost everything else.
All the best,
Nick
On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 8:07 PM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,
I will have to read your longer-form work. Your use of all this is so
far from my own, and so far from any literature and user community that I work
with or in, that I don’t even know what you mean different words to be doing in
your sentences, and thus what you believe yourself to be asserting. (If I
could track that much, I could then come back to whether I think the assertions
“go through”, or under what analysis one would make such a judgment.)
Clearly this is going to be a matter of just blanking my mind (giant
magnetostimulation of the brain) and submerging in your writing for a while, to
try to “get a feel” for your language usage. Then come back to these short
forms and see if I can follow them any better.
Eric
On Apr 6, 2026, at 7:42, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
DES -- One urgent point. I asked George to look at our correspondence to see what I was
missing. He caught one thing immediately "Fitness causes selection, selection causes
fitness" is not necessarily a tautology nor do i think of it as such. Its a virtuous circle,
or "spiral" so long as */selection and fitness can be independently known. /*
*/
/*
I apologise for wiring text that was open to that misinterpretation.
N
On Sun, Apr 5, 2026 at 5:39 AM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Nick,
I’m kind of relieved that I posted “I promise I really will shut
up” on Apr 1, before Gil’s brief blast of exasperation, which I kind of get. I
think I should keep my word, as much as possible without being obnoxious.
At the same time, thank you for taking the time to reply, including
what I actually wrote, and responding to it in-frame.
Your two papers are attached to the later email, too, so we have
them. I will read if and as I am able. The abstracts sound like they make a
much more normal reference to the routine work that people actually do, than
many of the post-string here have (to me); so that is hopeful.
I tried a couple of times to come up with some kind of reply, and
decided it is hopeless. There is a perfectly good language to address the
problem that, after we have identified and characterized traits, and observed
that sometimes they change frequencies in populations, we don’t generally know
at the outset whether there is something about the traits’ functions in
organisms’ lives (in their population contexts) that is eligible to be a
“cause” of that change in frequency. We would like to know, for which traits
in what settings, variations in trait parameters result in variations in
function performance that (through the vast noise of everything else that is
going on too) poke through to result in changes in trait frequency. There are
no tautologies in the statistical reduction that defines different components
of change (among which one is fitness, though its definition is partly by
convention), and there are no other problems than the ordinary problems
of functional characterization and statistical analysis in figuring
out which variations in trait parameters and functions correlate with changes
in trait frequency robustly enough to be candidates for cause of the change in
frequency. It’s all so terribly ordinary and understandable.
Meanwhile, you have a program: to assert that there are some
tautologies and some ambiguities etc. Therefore I understand that, since we
can observe a field of people who get from problem statements to answers, by
completely ordinary and conventional steps with standard methods, without
tautologies, whatever those people are doing is simply irrelevant to your
program.
I will admit, so that it doesn’t just seem irritating, that at a half-dozen
points below, I am sure that you are just throwing up verbal chaff and playing word games
to try to make something that is actually completely ordinary and orderly “look” all
mangled and messed up. But it doesn’t look that way to me. At every one of these, I
trip over some string of words that looks like complete nonsense, which doesn’t make the
idea we were on “look” like anything; it just veers away from the track of that idea to
put a word game in its place. (An example: "success causes fitness, and that
fitness causes success") It was after trying to call out two or three of these that
I realized i need to just give up. I suspect you could follow an ordinary mathematical
argument about as well as the next guy, and you just don’t want to. Thus anything I try
to reply will just yield another round with the same form as this one. I will add to
irritating the list, which is what
I wanted to cut away from doing earlier.
I appreciated your introduction of placeholders, and of course I am
quite open to that kind of thing. Not so open to the Chalmers kind, which is
defined as having _no_ added content from what our ordinary, understandable
language, is already doing. I don’t know why you think you see a
non-Chalmers-like placeholder here; but okay.
So, is it the English who say: Please Proceed.
I do hope you will be able to push through to the book you were
writing. We accumulate all these unfinished efforts, and it is a shame if they
can’t get to some safe harbor in some output.
Eric
On Apr 4, 2026, at 14:23, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
DES -- I hate to drag you back into our den and maul you some more but your last post was fascinating to me and so akin to difficulties we have had with Elliott Sober and difficulties I have had understanding entropy (ugh) that I want to pursue them with you further
*/--for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the units
(or dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified. Not
sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about defining
a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model variables that we
try to fit to them. I had taken the state of modern work to show that this is
the only actual meaning the term was ever given. /*
I am happy to have a variable with a name to represent that dimension. I
just think "fitness" is an appalling name for it. Call it selectedness. Call
it success. Just don't call it fitness or adaptedness or anything that might confuse a
reader into thinking that you have any information about the morphological or behavioral
synchrony of the organism with its environment. The essence of D's theory is that
success causes fitness, and that fitness causes success. If one calls oneself a
Darwinist it must be because those connections between the two ideas are empirical, not
logical.
*/— are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at
all the case? That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning,
instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a measurement
unit? /*
Indeed, we are
*/Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of
reproductive success”. As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the form of
a name, so there must be something it names, that is a kind of causal force
responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive success. And since
there is one name, there must be some one kind of causal force it names./*
Well, if we do believe that the relative success of every genetic type of
organism is systematic then it has a cause. Now I suppose that it's possible that each
instance of success has a different cause, in which we would have reduced Darwin's theory
to, "whatever causes an animal's sucess causes its success". But I think even
FW would rate that a tautology. To escape that bind, we have to find some class of
relations that leads to success which is other than the class that leads to failure. And
to be a proper Darwinian you have to at least be able to entertain the possibility that
selection would produce something other than fitness and vice versa.
*/— to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would
never have occurred to me to that there is anyone making it. /*
Well, here we are. We stand before you. I have been making such a claim in
print for 56 years, so either I have managed to pull the wool over many editors' and
reviewr's eyes, or it has some resonance somewhere among biologists. I hope calling it
"bizarre" isn't the first step toward putting your fingers in your ears and
shrieking.
.
/*It seems very similar to taking an expression like “elan vital”,
and saying that, since it has the shape of a name, there must be something it
names. */
/*
*/
Well, exactly! The example I like to use is the "dormitive virtue"..Years ago,
before the dinosaurs, Lipton and I wrote a paper in which we talked about such expressions that
purport to be explanatory but which include a reference to the explanandum within the explanans as
"recursive". (eg. life is caused by the Life Force) The dormitive virtue was a place-holder
for what came to be known as the very specific chemical properties of morphine. The Moliere play
makes fun of people who imagine that the assignment of a placeholder has solved the problem. We
thought of these place holders as serving to keep the goal in sight while scientists looked for it.
Science consists a lot in filling in or dividing up these place holders. The progress in the
identification of the AIDS virus is a wonderful example. See, if tempted, Comparative Psychology and
the recursive nature of filter explanations <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?
a=https%3a%2f%2fcommons.clarku.edu%2ffacultyworks%2f66%2f&c=E,1,k4G28ruXzTMikjk22fWt55DQZBrY8oTBaFPZetykCEmKkrdW7Zgm_InoVrTc91PCgHYC1XjdS7pzs2zz_HaX2PnsGuZtad3L3YiDf1g2E2bBiY5y9m0Lp_g,&typo=1>
/*
*/
/*To me, those are strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax
and that don’t have any semantic referents at all. They may as well be
Chomsky’s “colorless green dreams” or something. I would not have imagined
that there was anything anyone expected, beyond the working out of the
mechanics of lots of cases of how-lifecycles-play-out-in-*//*contexts, which
can fill out some vast taxonomy that has no singular “essence” underneath it.
That could well be my lack of empathy for how many other people think, like my
lack of empathy for their thoughts about God (along with my ignorance about who
is in the world). */
Indeed. That would explain a lot. Please understand that I am a
lifelong unbeliever. I am not even an atheist. My family had no interest in
religion whatsoever. You might call me a religious Ignoramist. I have never
been cuffed on the ears by nuns.
*/— I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about
Strong Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like
people who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked
about Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this
reading of what you were writing./*
Again, that explains a lot of our difficulties. But I beg to
suggest that there is a more generous reading.
/*the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my long
Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what population
geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be left is EricS’s 2a
and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and which isn’t interesting and
wasn’t to your point. So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating
that way*/? */And are there really biologists operating that way?y /*
Indeed there are. They are called comparative biologists, comparative
anatomists,comparative ethologists, comparative physiologists, anybody who studies the form
of classes of organisms in relation to their circumstances. Natural design didn't get
eliminated by Darwinism; it got partially, and incompletely and in some cases wrongly
explained by it. Some effort needs to be expended in finding out the degree to which natural
design actually accounts for natural selection and vice versa. Please see Toward a
Falsifiable Theory of Evolution
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fcommons.clarku.edu%2ffacultyworks%2f67%2f&c=E,1,uEqHnsI2N6agATrwVIuvnLowDECLxZG4KT5Za_GJiyC2lUxcNNve9iY0ZctgPVn2cXHp3MIF_4h0exfyKRO9KdPS6nCz0uerbqjb5nNIWBw,&typo=1>
Nick
On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 2:17 PM Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
DES -- I hate to drag you back into our den and maul you some more but your last post was fascinting to me and so akin to difficulties we have had with Elliott Sober and difficulties I have had understnding entropy (ugh) that I want to pursue them with you further
--for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the
units (or dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified.
Not sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about
defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model variables
that we try to fit to them. I had taken the state of modern work to show that
this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.
— are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at
all the case? That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning,
instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a measurement
unit? Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of reproductive
success”. As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the form of a name, so
there must be something it names, that is a kind of causal force responsible
for generating what we witness as reproductive success. And since there is one
name, there must be some one kind of causal force it names.
— to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would
never have occurred to me to that there is anyone making it. It seems very
similar to taking an expression like “elan vital”, and saying that, since it
has the shape of a name, there must be something it names. To me, those are
strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that don’t have any semantic
referents at all. They may as well be Chomsky’s “colorless green dreams” or
something. I would not have imagined that there was anything anyone expected,
beyond the working out of the mechanics of lots of cases of
how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out some vast taxonomy that
has no singular “essence” underneath it. That could well be my lack of empathy
for how many other people think, like my lack of empathy for their thoughts
about God (along with my ignorance about who is in the world).
— I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about
Strong Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like
people who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked
about Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this
reading of what you were writing.
If the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my
long Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what
population geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be left is
EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and which isn’t
interesting and wasn’t to your point.
So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating that
way?
And are there really biologists operating that way?
On Wed, Apr 1, 2026 at 5:15 AM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Can I ask one last question? after which I promise I really
will shut up:
The content of EricC’s note below (about the key in a
lock), reflecting back on things Nick said in the early posts about selection’s
being a tautology, which got me started digging a hole, have bothered me
through the night, and made me wonder if I can understand how I have been
missing both-of-y’all’s point. Was it something like the following:?
— for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the
units (or dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified.
Not sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about
defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model variables
that we try to fit to them. I had taken the state of modern work to show that
this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.
— are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is
not at all the case? That there are biologists for whom there is some other
meaning, instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a
measurement unit? Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of
reproductive success”. As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the form of
a name, so there must be something it names, that is a kind of causal force
responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive success. And since
there is one name, there must be some one kind of causal force it names.
— to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it
would never have occurred to me to that there is anyone making it. It seems
very similar to taking an expression like “elan vital”, and saying that, since
it has the shape of a name, there must be something it names. To me, those are
strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that don’t have any semantic
referents at all. They may as well be Chomsky’s “colorless green dreams” or
something. I would not have imagined that there was anything anyone expected,
beyond the working out of the mechanics of lots of cases of
how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out some vast taxonomy that
has no singular “essence” underneath it. That could well be my lack of empathy
for how many other people think, like my lack of empathy for their thoughts
about God (along with my ignorance about who is in the world).
— I guess, since there are people who continue to talk
about Strong Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much
like people who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have
talked about Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined
this reading of what you were writing.
If the above is what you were claiming, it would explain
why my long Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what
population geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be left is
EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and which isn’t
interesting and wasn’t to your point.
So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating
that way?
And are there really biologists operating that way?
As always, I appreciate whatever patience or indulgence,
Eric
On Mar 31, 2026, at 15:47, Eric Charles
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm a bit confused here...
The initial dog pile on Nick seemed (to me) to have as one of its
main points something like "Look, old man, once you formalize something
mathematically we don't need to care what any of the words might mean or imply in any
other context, it is just math, stop thinking that the words matter!"
And now there have been several posts by EricS, at least
one by Glen, and I think Marcus and Frank are in there somewhere as well,
claiming that the words are crucially important and we need to take them much
more seriously.
So.... where does that leave us? Is everyone now onboard
with the metaphors mattering quite a bit?
I'll also note that "function" can't do the work on its own to explain evolution. We
still need to know why some functions are favored by selection and others are not. EricS seemed to indicate that we
assess "fit" by determining if animals are "happy".... but the metaphor of "fit" is like
a key in a lock. To explain evolution you need the matching of form-and-function-to-a-particular-environment. That
matching *sometimes* increases reproductive success, and *sometimes* the traits in question are hereditary.
Population genetics combined with field research can be
very powerful along those lines, but the math of population genetics on its
own, floating out in the ether, can't do it at all.
Best,
Eric
<mailto:[email protected]>
On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 6:10 AM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Nick,
Two smaller replies to what have become two sub-threads:
> On Mar 30, 2026, at 15:42, Nicholas Thompson
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> DES, EPC, FW
>
> So far as I understand, the argument flowing from
Fisher makes no claims about the kind of trait that produces reproductive success
other than that it is the kind that produces reproductive success. FW, if that's
not a tautology, it's a pretty tight circle.
As usual, let’s decamp to more neutral ground in the
hope of having an ordinary negotiation.
Suppose that, in your overweening pursuit of the study
of metaphor, you never noticed that there is a once/4-year gathering called The
Olympics. Also never learned what any of its so-called “events” are, what they
are about, how they work, and how one differs from another. My hypothetical
here is meant to define a condition of having “very little prior information”
about some phenomenon that we can, nonetheless, still reasonably unambiguously
circumscribe.
But a quick inspection shows that a subset of the
participants (who all together seem to be called “athletes”) are given metal
disks and stand on some kind of 3-tiered podium, while other athletes do not.
Being a statistician — a skill so helpful in the study of metaphor that it was
worth taking the time out to learn — you immediately recognize that this is a
kind of marking that can be used to partition the athletes. Taking notice, for
the first time, of some of the conversation in the society around you, who seem
not nearly so devoted to metaphor and thus have time to do other things, you
gather that these marked people seem to be called “winners” (or better,
“medalists”, this “winning” thing is a finer sub-partition; I’ll mis-use
“winner” to label the most salient marking for this little parable). It’s
handy to have such a term, for use in later sentences, so they become less
tedious than the ones I have been typing so far.
You also note that while there is only one 3-tiered
podium and metal-disk set per one “event”, there seem to be many such distinct
“events”, so some kind of event name gives you a second kind of marking you can
put on the athletes. Moreover, interestingly, the “event” label is again a
proper partition (or at least seems to be; this one is less cut-and-dried than
the observation that everyone carrying a metal disk is not someone not-carrying
a metal disk, so we are wary; the event label seems to be a bit more abstract):
every athlete is in some “event” set, and it appears that no athlete is in more
than one of them. As with the “winners” label, you learn that there are
conventionalized names for the events, and you can find a look-up table if you
need one or another of them.
Now, I can make a list of statements that seem to be of
two different kinds (scare quotes here indicate my statisticians’ attribute
labels; in my condition of very little prior knowledge, I don’t claim I have
any more semantics for them than I listed above):
1. Every “winner" is someone marked as having won
something.
2a. Every winner in the “gymnastics” event is shorter
than the average over all the participants;
2b. Every winner in the “high jump” event is taller
than the average over all the participants;
… (we could presumably look for other such summary
statistics that seem to be unusually regular and to carry different values in
different “events”).
I would say sentence 1 is “a tautology”, or close
enough to it for the purpose of this negotiation. Maybe I should use EricC’s
good, and slighly more flexible term, “truism”.
Now you may write a protest email: But the sentences
2a, 2b, have not told me what constitutes “competition” in these “events”:
“gymnastics” and “high jump”, and given me the rule book for scoring them.
Okay. And they didn’t cook your dinner and do the dishes afterward either.
Life is hard. And more a propos (breaking my little 4th wall here), the path
to a fully-adequate “causal” theory through statistical inference is like the
Road to Heaven: narrow, tortuous, and inadequate to many things one can rightly
want to know. That’s what other sciences are then for.
But if you claim: The sentences 2a and 2b didn’t give
me _any information_ about these “events”, and couldn’t have, because they are
tautologies, I would say you made an error. Of course, the real Nick would not
say that, so we are all safe.
The above parable is, of course, about selection. I
didn’t say anything about heredity. But if I had happened to note that height
is a fairly heritable trait, I could have spun out a much longer story, and
defined some Bayesian-posterior conditional probabilities, which would be shown
to have properties such as: the posterior probability, under various ceteris
paribus conditions, for a child of a high-jump winner to turn out another
high-jump winner is higher than for that child to turn out a gymnastics winner,
and so forth. The amalgamation of both of those stories would go in the
direction of Fisher’s fundamental theorem. It would leave out all the stuff
that Fisher left out of emphasis in his mad pursuit of his covariance term as
an analog to the thermodynamic 2nd law (a non-valid analogy, as it turns out to
be easy to show), and that Price included didactically (and here, to EricC’s
answer): that I didn’t even mention that the tall people
might get drafted into wars and put into an infantry to
fire rifles over tall dijks, while the short people might be drafted into
Special Forces and sent on missions to attack through underground tunnels, and
so the number of survivors could depend on many factors about which war their
country had started, in what theater, and against what opposition, etc. These
are the world of everything-else that Fisher lumped together into
“deterioration of the environment”, as Steve Frank (and I think also Price)
lays out. They are probably not well-analogized to “mutation”, but in
genetics, mutation also goes into the same bin in the Price equation —
_outside_ the term of Fisher’s fundamental theorem — as the “deterioration”
effects. The accounting identity is flexible enough that we don’t need
analogies to use it; we can formulate a version for whatever statistics our
phenomenon-of-interest supplies.
Anyway; at issue: Seriously, do we have a problem in
scientific work, of people being unable to gain partial knowledge about
phenomena through sentences of the kinds 2a, 2b, because they can’t tell the
difference between those and sentence 1? In the world where I live, I don’t
see evidence for this mistake.
Eric
