Oh... huh... that's... huh....
I mean... it was an invasive species... not an invasive function... and they were presumably trying
to deal with the organisms that composed that species... so you can't focus on the "what
/functions /is it replacing" without there being an "it" that is doing the
replacing... can you?... but... at any rate...
One thing I'm fascinated by is people's (in-general) failure to distinguish between a broad term and the subcategory of that term
they particularly care about. It creates weird linguistic drift, as seen in modern discussions of "racism" and
"discrimination", for example. In Glen's story we might or might not want to distinguish between "invasive
species" and "invasive species we are highly concerned about because it seems likely to upset the entire
ecosystem". Presumably any species that is expanding into new territory is "invasive"... it is invading a
territory it did not previously have... so whatever pest is in question, IS invasive... right?* The question shouldn't be whether
it is invasive, but rather whether the invasiveness is problematic**, and we should therefore do something to try to stop it, or
at least mitigate its effects.
While obviously future-ecosystem-wide-impact is necessarily speculative... I
would assume one way to get at the distinction would be to know the place of
origin of the invasive species. Are we talking about an event occuring at the
intersection of naturally occuring ecosystems? For example, is a new species of
newt that evolved in the Appalachian mountains starting to slowly expand down
creeks that lead into the flat lands of Virginia? Or are we talking about wild
boar from another continent that someone brought in as pets, but which are now
running wild and expanding rapidly through the state? Probably the field of
conservation ecology takes that into account, along with many other factors,
based on research over the past several decades (it's a relatively young field).
Apparently the people Glen was dealing with weren't the decision makers in that regard,
as they had been "ordered" to come deal with the new species. But someone,
somewhere, might have been able to give a very clear answer to that question.
Heck, a local naturalist with enough experience might be able to give a fairly accurate
expert judgement on that without the need for specific study, if they have been tracking
the transition: "Oh, yeah, them... well... I first saw that spotted newt up on
Rupert's Peak over 40 years ago, and old Nell from over in Union County said he saw them
in the high mountains during the summers when he was a kid. They have been coming this
way for a long time, and don't seem to be causing much trouble." (I knew a handful
of the local naturalists when I lived in Altoona, Pennsylvania, but haven't really known
them in other areas where I have lived, and this is exactly the kind of thing they would
tell you... whether you asked about it or not...***)
In any case, still "invasive".
* Assuming the researchers are correct that it wasn't there before.
** "is problematic" = "we think it should be viewed as problematic for reasons" because
obviously something can only be "problematic" in relation to an implicit or explicit belief about
how things should be
*** I assume Nick will now object that HE was a local naturalist in Worcester
gosh darn it!... but I didn't really interact with him in that capacity 😅
Best,
EricC
<mailto:[email protected]>
On Wed, Apr 8, 2026 at 11:04 AM glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I feel like I'm going to regret this post. But what the hell, eh?
I was down with an unordered:
• collection of features
• measurement method
• successive execution of the method
• relative rates of change
So at the end of EricS' post, including the parse of "cause", I felt like I was stable. But then EricC goes on about
"animals change", "species change", and "organisms". OK, to be fair, EricS did use "generations"
and "reproductive". So there's an implicit ... what? ... unit, atom, ... thing in there that we all agree is doing the
_generating_ [⛧]. And it's common for that sort of thing to be entirely latent, occult. But I took EricS' primary criticism as pointing out
that it *is* occult, and speculation about the generator(s) has to take a particular form (namely relative frequency and rates of change of
the features given the measurement method). I.e. any conjecture about the generator has to be grounded in that.
And as anecdotal evidence that "field biologists" aren't unfamiliar with this, I accidentally ran across a bunch of WA state
Dept of Ag field workers having a conversation about some pest they've been ordered to mitigate. After my introduction as an
ultracrepidarian, I asked them how confident they were that this pest was "invasive" or merely slowly, beneficially swapping out
with some other species, performing the same "function"? (There's a word for that they used ... but I've forgotten it. Give me a
break. This conversation happened more than a year ago at the pub!) All 4 of them admitted there is no reliable measure to determine that.
Over time, they can estimate its tendency to take over more and/or different "function" than the one it's replacing in the niche.
But the more time that takes, the less it looks "invasive". So, at least these particular government bureaucrats are grounded in
the "relative rates of change between the featuers" and barely committed to the
concepts of "animals", "species", and "organisms".
As always, sorry for my incompetence. But I'm, as always, grateful for any
generous clues.
[⛧] And now for something mostly different. [2026 Sanders Prize in
Metaphysics](https://dailynous.com/2026/04/08/2026-sanders-prize-in-metaphysics-winners-announced/
<https://dailynous.com/2026/04/08/2026-sanders-prize-in-metaphysics-winners-announced/>).
I can't express how excited I am by the phrase "... truthmaker semantics can be used to
explain how logically complex sentences can be meaningful (and true) despite there being no
logically complex propositions for them to express." Will I actually read the paper?
Maybe! ... Prolly not. 8^(
On 4/7/26 10:23 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> "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] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2026 at 10:35 PM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[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]> <mailto:[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]> <mailto:[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]> <mailto:[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]> <mailto:[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]> <mailto:[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 <https://
linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url>?
>>>> a=https%3a%2f%2fcommons.clarku.edu
<http://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
<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]> <mailto:[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]> <mailto:[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]>
<mailto:[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]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 6:10 AM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[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]> <mailto:[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
