John Edser  wrote or quoted:
> 
> TT:-
> So: mentioning fitness is confusing, because of the many meanings of
> the word - and because the popular meanings lead to misunderstanding.
> A measure of absolute fitness would be more acceptable to me.
> 
> JE:-
> Why will nobody here admit that Darwinism 
> does contain an implicit absolute fitness?
> 
> ______________________________________
> box 1
> Darwinian fitness:
> The total number of fertile forms 
> reproduced by each parent into one 
> population.
> ______________________________________
> 
> The net results of the Darwinian absolute 
> fitness proposal above are:

FWIW, that isn't what I meant by "absolute fitness".

If one is trying to refer to fitness as something 
maximised by evolution - or simply increasing - then
this sort of thing won't do.  Many organisms probably
had about 2.6 kids millions of years ago as well -
and this quantity shows relatively little sign of
increasing with time.

If you are trying to use fitness to measure progress
in evolution, then you need a measure that really
*does* increase over time.

If today you replaced half of the world with its mesozoic equivalent -
and then waited a few thousand years - I reckon most of the metazoic fauna
and flora will have been wiped out in competition with modern forms - in a 
similar way to the way most marsupials don't stand up to competition with
placental mammals.

It would be a war of technology - the humans would obliterate the 
therapsids and archosaurs much as they are wiping out most of the 
modern large predators - by destroying or occupying their habitat -
and by shooting them.  The humans - and their ecosystem - would
win because they have better technology on a range of fronts.

It's perhaps a bit of a stretch to refer to something like
"technological prowess" as a sort of fitness - but that's
what I was talking about - not how many kids an organism has,
is expected to have - or anything like that.
-- 
__________
 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 6/29/04 5:25:10 PM