<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">example: quantum physics</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">math is all - "shut up and calculate."</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">but math is all "syntax"</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">words matter for human comprehension, semantics, of that which the math describes.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">And quine would claim that because quantum physics is at the fringe of science, metaphor is all we have.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div>On Tue, Mar 31, 2026, at 12:47 PM, Eric Charles wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><div dir="ltr"><div>I'm a bit confused here... </div><div>The initial dog pile on Nick seemed (to me) to have as one of its main points something like "Look, old man, once you formalize something mathematically we don't need to care what any of the words might mean or imply in any other context, it is just math, stop thinking that the words matter!" </div><div><br></div><div>And now there have been several posts by EricS, at least one by Glen, and I think Marcus and Frank are in there somewhere as well, claiming that the words are crucially important and we need to take them much more seriously. </div><div><br></div><div>So.... where does that leave us? Is everyone now onboard with the metaphors mattering quite a bit? </div><div><br></div><div>I'll also note that "function" can't do the work on its own to explain evolution. We still need to know why some functions are favored by selection and others are not. EricS seemed to indicate that we assess "fit" by determining if animals are "happy".... but the metaphor of "fit" is like a key in a lock. To explain evolution you need the matching of form-and-function-to-a-particular-environment. That matching *sometimes* increases reproductive success, and *sometimes* the traits in question are hereditary. </div><div><br></div><div>Population genetics combined with field research can be very powerful along those lines, but the math of population genetics on its own, floating out in the ether, can't do it at all. </div><div><br></div><div><div dir="ltr" class="qt-gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><span style="color:rgb(34, 34, 34);">Best,<br>Eric<br><br></span></div><div><br></div></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="mailto:echarles@american.edu" target="_blank"></a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><br></div></div><div><br></div><div class="qt-gmail_quote qt-gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="qt-gmail_attr">On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 6:10\u202fAM Santafe <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu">desmith@santafe.edu</a>> wrote:</div><blockquote class="qt-gmail_quote" style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204, 204, 204);padding-left:1ex;"><div>Hi Nick,</div><div> <br></div><div> Two smaller replies to what have become two sub-threads:</div><div> <br></div><div> > On Mar 30, 2026, at 15:42, Nicholas Thompson <<a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com" target="_blank">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><div> > </div><div> > DES, EPC, FW</div><div> > </div><div> > So far as I understand, the argument flowing from Fisher makes no claims about the kind of trait that produces reproductive success other than that it is the kind that produces reproductive success. FW, if that's not a tautology, it's a pretty tight circle. </div><div> <br></div><div> As usual, let\u2019s decamp to more neutral ground in the hope of having an ordinary negotiation.</div><div> <br></div><div> Suppose that, in your overweening pursuit of the study of metaphor, you never noticed that there is a once/4-year gathering called The Olympics. Also never learned what any of its so-called \u201cevents\u201d are, what they are about, how they work, and how one differs from another. My hypothetical here is meant to define a condition of having \u201cvery little prior information\u201d about some phenomenon that we can, nonetheless, still reasonably unambiguously circumscribe.</div><div> <br></div><div> But a quick inspection shows that a subset of the participants (who all together seem to be called \u201cathletes\u201d) are given metal disks and stand on some kind of 3-tiered podium, while other athletes do not. Being a statistician \u2014 a skill so helpful in the study of metaphor that it was worth taking the time out to learn \u2014 you immediately recognize that this is a kind of marking that can be used to partition the athletes. Taking notice, for the first time, of some of the conversation in the society around you, who seem not nearly so devoted to metaphor and thus have time to do other things, you gather that these marked people seem to be called \u201cwinners\u201d (or better, \u201cmedalists\u201d, this \u201cwinning\u201d thing is a finer sub-partition; I\u2019ll mis-use \u201cwinner\u201d to label the most salient marking for this little parable). It\u2019s handy to have such a term, for use in later sentences, so they become less tedious than the ones I have been typing so far. </div><div> <br></div><div> You also note that while there is only one 3-tiered podium and metal-disk set per one \u201cevent\u201d, there seem to be many such distinct \u201cevents\u201d, so some kind of event name gives you a second kind of marking you can put on the athletes. Moreover, interestingly, the \u201cevent\u201d label is again a proper partition (or at least seems to be; this one is less cut-and-dried than the observation that everyone carrying a metal disk is not someone not-carrying a metal disk, so we are wary; the event label seems to be a bit more abstract): every athlete is in some \u201cevent\u201d set, and it appears that no athlete is in more than one of them. As with the \u201cwinners\u201d label, you learn that there are conventionalized names for the events, and you can find a look-up table if you need one or another of them. </div><div> <br></div><div> Now, I can make a list of statements that seem to be of two different kinds (scare quotes here indicate my statisticians\u2019 attribute labels; in my condition of very little prior knowledge, I don\u2019t claim I have any more semantics for them than I listed above):</div><div> <br></div><div> 1. Every \u201cwinner" is someone marked as having won something.</div><div> <br></div><div> 2a. Every winner in the \u201cgymnastics\u201d event is shorter than the average over all the participants;</div><div> <br></div><div> 2b. Every winner in the \u201chigh jump\u201d event is taller than the average over all the participants; </div><div> <br></div><div> \u2026 (we could presumably look for other such summary statistics that seem to be unusually regular and to carry different values in different \u201cevents\u201d).</div><div> <br></div><div> I would say sentence 1 is \u201ca tautology\u201d, or close enough to it for the purpose of this negotiation. Maybe I should use EricC\u2019s good, and slighly more flexible term, \u201ctruism\u201d.</div><div> <br></div><div> Now you may write a protest email: But the sentences 2a, 2b, have not told me what constitutes \u201ccompetition\u201d in these \u201cevents\u201d: \u201cgymnastics\u201d and \u201chigh jump\u201d, and given me the rule book for scoring them. Okay. And they didn\u2019t cook your dinner and do the dishes afterward either. Life is hard. And more a propos (breaking my little 4th wall here), the path to a fully-adequate \u201ccausal\u201d theory through statistical inference is like the Road to Heaven: narrow, tortuous, and inadequate to many things one can rightly want to know. That\u2019s what other sciences are then for. </div><div> <br></div><div> But if you claim: The sentences 2a and 2b didn\u2019t give me _any information_ about these \u201cevents\u201d, and couldn\u2019t have, because they are tautologies, I would say you made an error. Of course, the real Nick would not say that, so we are all safe.</div><div> <br></div><div> The above parable is, of course, about selection. I didn\u2019t say anything about heredity. But if I had happened to note that height is a fairly heritable trait, I could have spun out a much longer story, and defined some Bayesian-posterior conditional probabilities, which would be shown to have properties such as: the posterior probability, under various ceteris paribus conditions, for a child of a high-jump winner to turn out another high-jump winner is higher than for that child to turn out a gymnastics winner, and so forth. The amalgamation of both of those stories would go in the direction of Fisher\u2019s fundamental theorem. It would leave out all the stuff that Fisher left out of emphasis in his mad pursuit of his covariance term as an analog to the thermodynamic 2nd law (a non-valid analogy, as it turns out to be easy to show), and that Price included didactically (and here, to EricC\u2019s answer): that I didn\u2019t even mention that the tall people might get drafted into wars and put into an infantry to fire rifles over tall dijks, while the short people might be drafted into Special Forces and sent on missions to attack through underground tunnels, and so the number of survivors could depend on many factors about which war their country had started, in what theater, and against what opposition, etc. These are the world of everything-else that Fisher lumped together into \u201cdeterioration of the environment\u201d, as Steve Frank (and I think also Price) lays out. They are probably not well-analogized to \u201cmutation\u201d, but in genetics, mutation also goes into the same bin in the Price equation \u2014 _outside_ the term of Fisher\u2019s fundamental theorem \u2014 as the \u201cdeterioration\u201d effects. The accounting identity is flexible enough that we don\u2019t need analogies to use it; we can formulate a version for whatever statistics our phenomenon-of-interest supplies.</div><div> <br></div><div> Anyway; at issue: Seriously, do we have a problem in scientific work, of people being unable to gain partial knowledge about phenomena through sentences of the kinds 2a, 2b, because they can\u2019t tell the difference between those and sentence 1? In the world where I live, I don\u2019t see evidence for this mistake.</div><div> <br></div><div> Eric</div><div> <br></div><div> <br></div><div> <br></div><div> <br></div><div> <br></div><div> <br></div><div> <br></div><div> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..</div><div> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv</div><div> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom <a href="https://bit.ly/virtualfriam" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://bit.ly/virtualfriam</a></div><div> to (un)subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a></div><div> FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a></div><div> archives: 5/2017 thru present <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a></div><div> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a></div></blockquote></div><div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..</div><div>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv</div><div>Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom <a href="https://bit.ly/virtualfriam">https://bit.ly/virtualfriam</a></div><div>to (un)subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a></div><div>FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com</a>/</div><div>archives: 5/2017 thru present <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a></div><div> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com</a>/</div><div><br></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div></body></html>