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wrote or quoted:
> Tim Tyler  wrote in message
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[number of kids metric?]

> > If one is trying to refer to fitness as something 
> > maximised by evolution - or simply increasing - then
> > this sort of thing won't do.  
> 
> The appropriate maximand is something which might be called 'relative
> fitness'.  This obviously doesn't increase over time, since the
> expectation of relative fitness at all times is 1.

That sort of relative fitness has some problems of its own.  Who else
do you include in the population?  Only other members of the species?

If so, that neglects competiton between species - and
focusses on competiton between individuals - perhaps a
rather distorted way to focus on nature.

> > If you are trying to use fitness to measure progress
> > in evolution, then you need a measure that really
> > *does* increase over time.
> 
> And there is no reason to call it "fitness".

It seems like an appropriate term to me - if it wasn't
already so overloaded.  Today, "fitness" is a bad name
for practically anything - due to the overloading problem.

> Wouldn't the sensible approach be to define "progress" first?

Progress means "advance" or "steady improvement".

I did try to give some indication of what that might mean in the
context of biology in my last post:

``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.''
-- 
__________
 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
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