Re: Fitness

Dear FISers:

This brief remark concerns only the nature of the notion of "fitness."

I would be reluctant to accept the notion of fitness at face value.
This reluctance stems from the long standing issues in population
genetics.
The fundamental issues are the sources of causality with respect to
"fitness". The logical entanglement of the external processes with the
internal processes and the capability of organisms to modify both the
external as well as the internal processes suggests that no simple
calculation of fitness is possible. Such a calculation would require a
disentanglement of the external dynamics from the internal dynamics.
This seems to be an a priori impossibility.

While the concept of fitness served some useful purposes several decades
ago, I believe that the term has been made obsolete by recent advances
in biological dynamics.

Jerry LR Chandler

Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
>
> Dear Bob & Morris, fisers--
>
> Both the discussion between Bob and Morris about the emergence of social
> complexity, and the other more general one about the underlying
> consciousness problem look quite enticing.
>
> About the first one, initially I disagree with Morris on the impact of
> anisogamy in human societies. The evolutionary trend observed in "mating
> preferences" is towards neoteny --both for males and females appearance.
> There are quite exciting new ideas about that (see a recent Nature paper).
> But I second the rest of Morris�s arguments. I believe it is a parsimonious
> biological complement to Bob's own tenets on VEMS --that I second too.
>
> However I would have referred, in the discussion, to a basic biological
> term: FITNESS. Perhaps an interesting view on VEMS is that they represent
> the "translation" or the reverberation of biological fitness into the
> multiple interconnected layers of social life --even in "simpler" primate
> and hunter gatherer bands. Then, VEMS would map ONLY the essentials of
> human fitness in the variety of socio-cultural settings: family, relatives,
> work acquaintances and alliances, tribal or state life (patriotism)...
> every big change in social life, as Bob points out, will impact on and will
> interact with existing VEMS.
>
> The above goes for FITNESS maintenance. But complexification of societies
> would stem out from a different path: knowledge accumulation. The history
> of numbers and of writing shows how at the very beginning the priests were
> the custodians of permanent records (always because of the limitation of
> oral cultures--see Ifrah, 1985), and both VEMS and numbers (and writing)
> shared a sacred character, with dedicated sacerdotal custodians. For
> instance, the well known Summerian priests, also the incas had the
> "quipucamayocs" or knot-keepers, priests in charge of the rope-knots where
> the basic "accounting" of the village or the city was kept.
>
> And then the basic thesis is that the accumulation of knowledge, involving
> intercultural contacts, multiple trade-offs and the emergence of new trades
> and professions, clearly beyond the original VEMS province, became the
> ROYAL ROAD of social complexity. Further inventions allowed crossing
> several complexity thresholds, economic takeoffs, etc.
>
> Of course, VEMS always keep reverberating around any of these social
> inventions (see the present ethical dilemmas around the genome
> project)---but clearly the engine of social complexification is Knowledge
> Accumulation (a curious variety of info!!!)...
>
> Apart from Bob and Morris and the other discussant responses, perhaps it is
> time for Andreas Goppold (historical costs of knowledge acumulation) and
> Vicente Salas (information and economy) to enter into the fray too... This
> was the original plan of the socioinfo conference--and then the closing
> point will be "info revolution & global brain" by Tom Stonier and
> Wolfang...
>
> greetings from Zaragoza
>
> Pedro
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Mariju�n. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
> Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
> Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
> email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Wed Oct 21 03:02:56 1998