"phillip smith"  wrote >

How can we know this. Presumably we can only know this when the individual
> is dead. As they may other wise have more offspring in the future. Also do
> you count the fertile offspring if they all fail to reproduce even if 
> though
> are fertile. They may be fertile but have a mutated mate recognition 
> system
> or perhaps they breed  but the next generation dies.
> Mutations like grandchild less
>
> http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/virtualembryo/mago.html
>
> Would up set your case. If you parents produced offspring with the
> grandchildless phenotype would be fertile but would have no grandchildren

Looking at this issue from the point of view of an outsider, I get the 
feeling that "fitness", which is essentially a statement about probability 
of survival (of something) over time, has been reified into an attribute of 
an organism, similar to objective characteristics such as weight and color. 
As a result, we are eternally immersed in pointless theological disputes 
about its meaning and relevance.
Consider the case of a sexual species into which a parthenogenic female is 
introduced by mutation. Assuming that she and her immediate offspring 
survive, and that the population size is constant, her offspring will 
effectively displace the sexual type in a few dozen generations. But 
ultimately the population will likely succumb to disease as a result of lack 
of genetic diversity. So what is the "fitness" of the mutation that caused 
the transformation?  A meaningless question, in my view. The only thing that 
matters is the probability at any time after the mutation is introduced that 
its populational frequency has a given value. Without the introduction of 
time and probability, no understanding of fitness is possible.
When we say that a novel variation confers "fitness", we are
merely guessing 
about its effect on the population in the near future.
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