In reply to Craig. Thank you, first of all! Well, what I was criticizing wasn't the concept in general but the neo-Darwinian interpretation in particular. It's their interpretation of "fitness" which makes the concept into a tautology. The whole neo-Darwinian ideology to me just becomes a pseudo-teleology. They can't really deduce their interpretations form their premises because their first premise is a tautology. One interesting thing is that the human central nervous system mustn't be a product of "selective pressure" but could be something that just somehow suddenly was. One reason why it might be so, is that the "fitness" derived from the nervous system wasn't really used at all in the beginning: or put in the words of MoQ, intellectual supremacy over biological and social static patterns of quality wasn't originally recognized. It was actually just quite recently that it made humans so numerous as they are today. So I would like to say that from the beginnings, humans survived not because of their intellect, but DESPITE it. They seem originally to have been binding it up in lots of traditions and rituals so as to not let it destroy them. But consider evolution a process of mapping the world onto the DNA, or in words of MoQ, making dynamic quality into static biological patterns (which in itself I somehow a dynamical process if it's continuous) better explains the course of evolution and makes it rest upon firmer premises.
/A (Alexander Jarnroth) -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: den 22 oktober 2010 05:16 To: [email protected] Cc: moq discuss Subject: Re: [MD] An attempt to reconcile the Metaphysics of Quality with the Cartesian dichotomy and ordinary epistemology [Alexander] > Now first, what is natural selection? "The survival of the fittest" Now, > what is fitness? That's being adapted to the surroundings. But what does > that mean? Well, it means knowing a lot of things about the surroundings. In > usual neodarwinism, you say that natural selection means: the genetic > pattern being most adapted is the pattern managing to reproduce itself on a > larger scale than other patterns, and thus increasing its share of the > population total relative to those other patterns. > But this is, in fact, a tautology. Logically reduced, it becomes "those > becoming most are becoming more than those becoming less". Your entire post was excellent--I'm not sure the MoQ Discuss can improve upon it. Except, I do disagree with the part quoted above. "The survival of the fittest" is not a tautology nor was it meant to be one. First, consider the individual case: A mountain goat that is sure-footed is fitter to survive than one that is not. But that does not mean an unexpected avalanche cannot kill the former but not the latter. So it is a contingent (not necessary) matter whether the former out-survives the latter. Instead of individuals, let's look at the trait of "sure-footedness": Having the trait of sure-footedness makes it more likely that the individual will have reproductive success (the ram has better mounting ability), so it is expected that the proportion of the population that are sure-footed goats will increase over time. But again, this is a contingent matter, though the odds favor it. Craig Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
