N.Wells
Posts: 1836 Joined: Oct. 2005
|
Gary, lately you've been infesting the internet like an outbreak of Ebola, with absolutely no success whatsoever. No one with any knowledge of science has been impressed, so all you've accomplished is convincing an even larger audience of the lunacy of your ideas.
You say complete twaddle like, Quote | From my experience "fitness" is a generalization. | , which makes it obvious that your experience is completely worthless and you have no idea what you are talking about, and, worse, you say it as if you expect people to nod sagely in agreement. At one level, yes, everything is a generalization, but not in a way that detracts from its usefulness and its accuracy. Fitness is a very well worked out concept, with a good operational definition: it's mathematically legitimate, it has excellent supporting evidence, and fitness data can easily be duplicated independently (none of which is true of your stuff). Even the point about the supposed problem of apparent fitness caused by lots of offspring, but who happen to be sterile, is a non-issue: in rare cases where reproductive success does not lead to grandchildren, or grandparents contribute importantly to the reproductive success of their grandchildren, or (more commonly) where reproductive success is achieved through the reproduction of siblings or cousins, fitness works perfectly when defined more precisely by reproductive success measured by the degree of propagation of each individual's genes in the third generation. In "normal" cases, the number of offspring is a perfectly adequate measure. However, in social insects and other organisms with weird genetic systems and in apparently altruistic populations where organisms sacrifice their own reproductive success for the benefits of their close relatives, we get some unusual results. Again, selection theory handles these perfectly!
If you were trying to combine tragedy and comedy in performance art, it would be hard to do better, but as science your stuff fails on every level.
What on earth are you getting out of it?
|