[FRIAM] Metaphor... and more...
Santafe
desmith at santafe.edu
Wed Apr 8 01:37:51 EDT 2026
Thank you EricC; thank you Nick,
Oi!
All to the good in what you have below, EPC.
I should probably start with the paper because it is shorter, and try to read around any dated points of view.
I would, of course, be honored to have a copy of the book draft, but I am terrible at following through anything of that length. The very obligation of promising to do so leads me off into a fractal of procrastinating, like I am doing in this email thread to avoid other things I am on the hook to do. So if that didn’t come across as an insult to you both, of course hope springs eternal that I will make the effort.
I appreciate your putting up with my colorful framings of things.
Eric
> On Apr 8, 2026, at 14:23, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "I can come up with a story about why these should or might matter to reproductive success and through it to frequency change, and because I can describe some mechanism, my story will be built up around that mechanism."
>
> I can come up with a story about why these should or might matter to reproductive success, and through it to frequency change, and because I can describe some mechanism..... I can carry out experiments, and observational studies, in the well established traditions of the field biologist, ethologist, biological anthropologist, etc., to confirm the viability of that theory, and thereby increase my confidence that I have correctly identified the crucial way in which the organisms under my study fit their environment. And when I do so, I will not sweep under the rug all the background knowledge (in terms of comparisons with other species and/or engineering principles) that led to the initial hypothesis.
>
> The connection to empirical field research is critical. The pure-math approach is viable in its self-contained world (and I have read enough early statistics work, including Fischer, to deeply appreciate that world), but it mentally disconnects those discussing the topic from the wild world in which the organisms live. Yes, obviously everything you say about regressions is true, but the question for Darwin wasn't whether or not animals change over time; due to fossil evidence, the scientific community at large already agreed that species change. The question was WHY do certain traits become more prominent in future generations. The regression, at best, shows which traits are corresponding to reproductive success ("at best", because of all the well understood challenges of ascribing causality to that math, which we don't need to rehash in this setting). Testing the hypothesis in the field can confirm (or refute) our intuitive notions (our stories) regarding why certain traits should be favored over others, and that includes sometimes refuting the causality a researcher wishes to imply by displaying a very pretty regression analysis.
>
> Nick... why did you reopen this conversation after EricS nodded sagely at my prior post? You really, really don't know how to take a win.
>
> Also, why the hell do you keep sending your old papers? If there is a warm body willing to read anything, you should be sending out the draft manuscript!
>
> EricS... if you are willing to read anything, I would greatly value your reading some of the book-in-progress, which incorporates exactly the papers Nick keeps sending you... but... as an added benefit, the book draft is more focused on the overall argument, and less stuck to 40-60 year old literature. I would happily send you the current draft, and direct you to the parts corresponding to the papers Nick recently shared, if you would be willing to take a look.
>
> Best,
> Eric
>
> -
> <mailto:echarles at american.edu>
>
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2026 at 10:35 PM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>> Nick, you are a sundew.
>>
>> Was that a metaphor? Maybe more of a taxonomic classification.
>>
>>
>> There are two things at work here, both of which I will fail to impact by whatever I write below:
>>
>> 1. A large part of the mismatch is the degree to which reading you is, for me, like reading a literal text translation into contemporary English of something written in the 5th century. There were plenty of priests at that time, as smart as anybody alive today, who would have insisted that things they said were meaningful. But knowing they would say it, and that they were smart, doesn’t enable me to see it that way. Nothing I write will make that the source of that mismatch visible to you, for the simple reason that the one thing none of us can see is the back of his own head. I no more than you.
>>
>> 2. A lot of this is about what different people feel like thinking about. Nothing I can say below will have any effect on what you feel like thinking about. So your discourse will continue unrefracted, like neutrinos or dark matter, along its present course. And that’s, of course, COMPLETELY FINE. If that weren’t the point of freedom, what would be?
>>
>> All this I know. I’ll annoy the list and break my own word anyway, in the hope that whatever I leave in the record of the list was as good an effort as I could make to say something that seems coherent and correct to me, now and later if I ever see it again.
>>
>> I’ll also note that the chatbot’s summary of my position is incorrect in its points 2 and 3. But that’s not a big deal either. The bots prioritize, in this order: 1) gracefulness; 2) inclusiveness of coverage of their inputs, if that is convenient; and 3) semantic coherence, if they get lucky and it works out that way. It broke a bit at 2 (inclusiveness, since I never said I think statistics is complete and mechanistic analysis non-contributing), and coherence at a meaning level starts off already impaired in that way. The chatbot’s point 3 is just flatly wrong. But whatever; it’s fine. We know they do that, and we make allowances.
>>
>> All the same, the chatbot’s synopsis layer is fine to work within — a lot more graceful than my writing — and your sending it is good faith.
>>
>>
>> So, then, what?: What’s at issue in all this back-and-forth?:
>>
>> 1. What can you vaguely wave around at, and what do you need to mean something fairly definite about?
>>
>> 1.a. If the job is to account for changes in the frequency-of-attestation of features in some population, then their relative rates of change through reproductive generations is the brute mechanics producing those changes. I think if we believe in non-hallucinatory observation of populations, we are stuck with this much. You don’t get to choose this, or to fudge it, or to hem and haw and waffle and dart into the fog. You have to commit to something. NOTE HERE PLEASE that I explicitly used a very general, observational-type term that I did not define — “rates of change through reproductive generations” — and I DID NOT USE SOME JARGON-TERM (such as “reproductive success”, which I also didn’t define), because if one has to treat this part 1.a carefully, then one can’t just waffle around in informal English. (Unless you _want_ the conversation to be incapable of ever resolving by going in some definite direction….) It’s a pity that Fisher was such a jerk, while Sewall Wright was, by all accounts, a complete gentleman his whole life. But Wright wasn’t a statistician, and neither were the others working at the lead-in to the 1930s. And the way the rest of them were trying to describe these things could have gone around in circles for centuries more. So, jerk or no jerk, and whatever the other limitations of his method, Fisher cut out the incoherence and set down some methods that enabled the field to be definite about how it was quantifying various rates of change from observations, and thus to make commitments about what its causal models were hoped to account for. That’s why I keep coming back to him. There is a specific piece of this that involves defining the observable topics for scientific inquiry, and any possibility of meaning for any other elements is contingent on doing that first one coherently.
>>
>> 1a.i: Now clearly, the frequency of attestation of a feature in a population can change by a variety of processes, some of which you want to attach to individuals and others to population states (all of these, — obviously — in context of other environment boundary-condition contexts), some of which you expect might be explicable in terms of parent properties, and others of which you don’t think should be predictable at all within this scope (sampling noise). This is why you don’t get to just offhand-conflate change in frequency of attestation of features with “reproductive success”, unless you want people to blow you off. You need to define what you are going to mean by “a contribution from `reproductive success’ “, and other contributions from other things (mutation, environment-dependent plasticity in how the feature expresses, novel functional aspects of what the feature _is_, still sampling noise, and on and on). “Reproductive success” itself might get decomposed into attributes sensibly attachable to an organism and others that would not make sense if attached in that way (maybe they only make sense if attached to the interaction of mating pairs of organisms). This bullet-point-here (1.a.i) is the one behind my remark to Frank that “reproductive success” is only one component of change in frequency of attestation, because I know this will be obvious and second-nature to him. It will also be obvious to him that a decomposition of a total-change statistic into different components can be checked for being well-defined, while at the same time there may be some conventional choices in how the decomposition is done, and one can debate whether they were good or poor choices.
>>
>> 1.a.ii: Do you understand that _I really don’t care_ what you call these things, as long as you will tell me what you are using and then stay with it. If you don’t like that Fisher called a certain component “fitness”, then You do You. I don’t care. What I do care about is that the quantity we are talking about has mechanical roles that we don’t get to dictate, and so we are bound by those.
>>
>> 1.b. After we accept that we are bound by 1.a., everything else is up to us in what we think the explanatory problem is. Here, I think, is where you want to claim there is a there there for a certain point of view, and I am not moved. We have two examples: Your parable of the shirts below is one. Similar is EricC’s history-anchored characterization of the Parrots and Large Ground Finches et alia, which he began with the sentence opening: Fitness = How well the organism fits the environment…. Now, if you asked me (which you didn’t) how I would summarize the content of those passages, in operational language that I find meaningful, my summary would be: I can come up with a story about why these should or might matter to reproductive success and through it to frequency change, and because I can describe some mechanism, my story will be built up around that mechanism. Okay. If you want there to be a term “fitness” that unpacks to these sorts of “I can come up with a story….” passages, then that choice will allow you to make statements like: "the amount of money made by the shirt-wearer is just not what is meant by the fit of the shirt” (Nick, through the parable); or "We expect fitness to predict survival (to reproductive age) and reproductive success, but there is no guarantee that it does in any particular case” (EricC, with not quite the same meaning, and a meaning that admits an interpretation much more compatible with Fisher’s statistical decomposition). Since EricC was not so specific that I know what he meant, let me keep the tar brush away from him. He could have meant (and his "Fitness = How well the organism fits” would be consistent with having meant) that “I had a story that it should matter, but it turns out not to have mattered as I expected”, but he could also just have been referring to the difference between a single stochastic trajectory and the average over a distribution of such trajectories, which would be totally normal, or that the Price equation contains additional terms beyond Fisher’s covariance, which would also be normal. But Nick, insofar as he will ever hold still on a meaning if it looks like he is about to be held responsible for it, does seem to mean “I had a story that it (this or that fashion element of shirt measure) would show up in reproductive success (wealth), but it didn’t.”
>>
>> 1.b.i: Now, you are welcome to try to come up with a term that unpacks to “I can come up with a story for why….”, so that you can make such sentences. But I won’t join you in doing that. “I can come up with a story for why…" sounds to me like a hypothesis, which has the great holy virtue that it can be wrong. To try to take the same thing and make it the foundation for a definition looks to me like running headlong into the brambles. Please go ahead, but I will stay here.
>>
>> 1.b.ii: The fact that the chatbot has re-glossed one of the senses you want for a term “fitness” as “adaptational adequacy”, which you hate, should be informative. I told you in an earlier email that all these terms, “fitness”, “adaptation”, etc., are not in any sense interchangeable for me. I can unpack “adaptation” on its own with measures of deviation of a realized outcome from some null hypothesis. (And I do formalize it that way.) That leaves the poor word “adequacy” hanging out there exposed, where all can see that you haven’t said anything about how you will assess what is adequate and what is not. Because, of course, there is either the fact that it shows evidence of producing frequency change through reproductive success, which is (I say) the hypothesis we wish to test, and (you say) is this disappointing tautology, or else there is some other meaning like "Nick finds this _so_ compelling”, which I don’t think works for definitions.
>>
>> 1.c: The various sub-points of 1.b are harped on to argue that hypotheses and definitions are not interchangeable. _Of course_, I am not averse to all sorts of pattern recognition, classification, abstraction, etc. In my lexicon: An “abstraction" never violates the instances _of which it is a classification_. So first get straight what features do result in changes in their own frequencies, what empirical evidence you have for that, and how they do so. That will remain correct after you classify cases, if it was correct before you did the classification. If you can find more general patterns in the relations that lead to feature-frequency change, then great; add to the interpretive richness of evolutionary theory.
>>
>>
>> So does this help?
>>
>> I’ll give you one last example of what I mean when I say that you write things that sound 5th-century to me, and then explain what I think a modern could put in its place that wouldn’t sound that way.
>>
>> A few days ago, you wrote "Well, if we do believe that the relative success of every genetic type of organism is systematic then it has a cause.” In informal speech, I can go along with this, when we are broadly in agreement. But to write that after you have just written things like "The essence of D's theory is that success causes fitness, and that fitness causes success.”, I know there is going to be a big mess because you haven’t said what you want “cause” to mean, and are likely to run off into the fog if I try to pin you down about it. So that’s where you sound like a Scholastic, or a pre-Leibnizian, responding to the forms of sentences without being serious about the need for a semantic grounding.
>>
>> Here is what I would say Glymour, Pearl, and others would put in place of your sentence about “… it has a cause.” Rather: “This certain pattern of systematic correlations, including the impacts upon them of changes in environmental conditions (Pearl’s “DO” operator) is eligible to be _what we mean by_ `cause' for this class of problems.”
>>
>> I didn’t go in thinking “cause” was just a term I could use. Thus, when you toss it off in a sentence about how two other things that you also haven’t defined cause each other (even in a virtuous feedback), not only can I not attach a meaning to the terms in the sentence; I can’t even tell what kind of a sentence it is supposed to be.
>>
>>
>> All best,
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Apr 8, 2026, at 5:24, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> DES, et al.,
>>>
>>> I have called in george as a mediator:
>>>
>>> Here is my prompt:
>>>
>>> George, I need your help with communication. I am corresponding with a mathematician, complexity theorist, mathematics-of-life guy, who says he's unable to understand my point of view. He is a very bright guy, so this is embarrassing to me. I think my view on the relation between fitness and natural selection is at LEAST cognizable. Can you please play the role of mediator here, stating the two positions and then finding points of agreement and articulating real points of disagreement.
>>>
>>> Here is his reply
>>> Let me try to restate both positions, then separate agreement from disagreement.
>>>
>>> DES, your position (as I understand it) is that evolutionary theory already has a clear and effective framework for dealing with selection. We can identify traits, observe changes in their frequencies, and use statistical tools to analyze those changes. In that framework, “fitness” functions as a quantitative characterization of differential reproductive success (or closely related model variables). It is not intended to name a single underlying causal essence, and explanation proceeds through ordinary empirical and statistical work linking variation, context, and outcomes.
>>>
>>> NST, your position is that this framework, while valid, leaves out something essential if “fitness” is identified with reproductive success. You want to distinguish between (i) the fact that some organisms leave more offspring and (ii) the organism–environment relations that tend to produce that outcome. For that second notion, we can use the placeholder adaptational adequacy. Your concern is that if fitness is defined only in terms of realized reproductive success, then evolutionary theory lacks an independently characterized concept for those relations and risks becoming purely retrospective.
>>>
>>> Crucially, NST’s view is not that this second notion is mysterious or inaccessible. It is studied through established biological methods — especially comparative approaches that examine the form, behavior, and physiology of organisms in relation to their environments across cases. By identifying recurring patterns in how particular traits function in particular contexts, these methods aim to build a body of knowledge about which kinds of organism–environment relations tend to promote success. On this view, adaptational adequacy is not a single formal variable, but a structured empirical domain that supports informed expectations in new cases.
>>>
>>> With that clarification, there is substantial agreement:
>>>
>>> Both of you accept that differential reproductive success can be measured and analyzed rigorously.
>>> Both of you accept that explanation requires empirical investigation of traits in context.
>>> Both of you accept that there is no single simple causal essence underlying all cases of success.
>>> The real disagreements are these:
>>>
>>> Meaning of “fitness”
>>> DES uses it as a statistical characterization of reproductive success.
>>> NST holds that this collapses a distinction and leaves no term for the organism–environment relations that may explain success.
>>> Role of comparative biological knowledge
>>> DES treats the statistical framework as sufficient for evolutionary explanation.
>>> NST holds that comparative and functional studies provide an additional, indispensable layer: they identify patterns of adaptational adequacy that are not captured by outcome measures alone.
>>> Prediction vs. retrospection
>>> DES is satisfied with explanation grounded in analysis of observed outcomes.
>>> NST emphasizes that biology also develops expectations about new systems by drawing on accumulated knowledge of how organisms interact with environments.
>>> A possible way forward is to keep these roles distinct. “Reproductive success” (and its statistical representations) can remain the outcome variable analyzed by population genetics. At the same time, comparative and functional biology can be recognized as developing knowledge of organism–environment relations — NST’s adaptational adequacy — that help explain and sometimes anticipate those outcomes.
>>>
>>> Framed this way, the statistical framework remains intact, while NST’s point is preserved: evolutionary explanation involves not only measuring success, but also building a body of knowledge about the kinds of relations that tend to produce it.
>>>
>>>
>>> I would contest George's mediation on one point. Words cannot be dragged from their ordinary language meanings too far or too fast without creating mischief. Everybody knows that the fit of a shirt has something to do with how it sits on the body, and while a man with good fitting shirts may make more money than a man with ill-fitting shirts, the amount of money made by the shirt-wearer is just not what is meant by the fit of the shirt. I can imagine all sorts of well fitting shirts that the wearing of which would not make me wealthy. I can also imagine poorly fitting shirts that might make me rich. As long as I can even imagine such combinations, shirtfit does not mean wealthy.
>>>
>>> I think that this is where you all will find me most irritating. I should be willing to accept George's ugly neologism, "adaptational adequacy", and concede fitnes to the enumerable contexts in which reproductive success is found. I am not! That I continue to be irritating in this way should not hide the fact that we seem to agree on almost everything else.
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>>
>>> Nick
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 8:07 PM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>>>> Thanks Nick,
>>>>
>>>> I will have to read your longer-form work. Your use of all this is so far from my own, and so far from any literature and user community that I work with or in, that I don’t even know what you mean different words to be doing in your sentences, and thus what you believe yourself to be asserting. (If I could track that much, I could then come back to whether I think the assertions “go through”, or under what analysis one would make such a judgment.)
>>>>
>>>> Clearly this is going to be a matter of just blanking my mind (giant magnetostimulation of the brain) and submerging in your writing for a while, to try to “get a feel” for your language usage. Then come back to these short forms and see if I can follow them any better.
>>>>
>>>> Eric
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Apr 6, 2026, at 7:42, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> DES -- One urgent point. I asked George to look at our correspondence to see what I was missing. He caught one thing immediately "Fitness causes selection, selection causes fitness" is not necessarily a tautology nor do i think of it as such. Its a virtuous circle, or "spiral" so long as selection and fitness can be independently known.
>>>>>
>>>>> I apologise for wiring text that was open to that misinterpretation.
>>>>>
>>>>> N
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Apr 5, 2026 at 5:39 AM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>>>>>> Hi Nick,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I’m kind of relieved that I posted “I promise I really will shut up” on Apr 1, before Gil’s brief blast of exasperation, which I kind of get. I think I should keep my word, as much as possible without being obnoxious.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> At the same time, thank you for taking the time to reply, including what I actually wrote, and responding to it in-frame.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Your two papers are attached to the later email, too, so we have them. I will read if and as I am able. The abstracts sound like they make a much more normal reference to the routine work that people actually do, than many of the post-string here have (to me); so that is hopeful.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I tried a couple of times to come up with some kind of reply, and decided it is hopeless. There is a perfectly good language to address the problem that, after we have identified and characterized traits, and observed that sometimes they change frequencies in populations, we don’t generally know at the outset whether there is something about the traits’ functions in organisms’ lives (in their population contexts) that is eligible to be a “cause” of that change in frequency. We would like to know, for which traits in what settings, variations in trait parameters result in variations in function performance that (through the vast noise of everything else that is going on too) poke through to result in changes in trait frequency. There are no tautologies in the statistical reduction that defines different components of change (among which one is fitness, though its definition is partly by convention), and there are no other problems than the ordinary problems of functional characterization and statistical analysis in figuring out which variations in trait parameters and functions correlate with changes in trait frequency robustly enough to be candidates for cause of the change in frequency. It’s all so terribly ordinary and understandable.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Meanwhile, you have a program: to assert that there are some tautologies and some ambiguities etc. Therefore I understand that, since we can observe a field of people who get from problem statements to answers, by completely ordinary and conventional steps with standard methods, without tautologies, whatever those people are doing is simply irrelevant to your program.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I will admit, so that it doesn’t just seem irritating, that at a half-dozen points below, I am sure that you are just throwing up verbal chaff and playing word games to try to make something that is actually completely ordinary and orderly “look” all mangled and messed up. But it doesn’t look that way to me. At every one of these, I trip over some string of words that looks like complete nonsense, which doesn’t make the idea we were on “look” like anything; it just veers away from the track of that idea to put a word game in its place. (An example: "success causes fitness, and that fitness causes success") It was after trying to call out two or three of these that I realized i need to just give up. I suspect you could follow an ordinary mathematical argument about as well as the next guy, and you just don’t want to. Thus anything I try to reply will just yield another round with the same form as this one. I will add to irritating the list, which is what I wanted to cut away from doing earlier.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I appreciated your introduction of placeholders, and of course I am quite open to that kind of thing. Not so open to the Chalmers kind, which is defined as having _no_ added content from what our ordinary, understandable language, is already doing. I don’t know why you think you see a non-Chalmers-like placeholder here; but okay.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So, is it the English who say: Please Proceed.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I do hope you will be able to push through to the book you were writing. We accumulate all these unfinished efforts, and it is a shame if they can’t get to some safe harbor in some output.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Eric
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Apr 4, 2026, at 14:23, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> DES -- I hate to drag you back into our den and maul you some more but your last post was fascinating to me and so akin to difficulties we have had with Elliott Sober and difficulties I have had understanding entropy (ugh) that I want to pursue them with you further
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the units (or dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified. Not sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model variables that we try to fit to them. I had taken the state of modern work to show that this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I am happy to have a variable with a name to represent that dimension. I just think "fitness" is an appalling name for it. Call it selectedness. Call it success. Just don't call it fitness or adaptedness or anything that might confuse a reader into thinking that you have any information about the morphological or behavioral synchrony of the organism with its environment. The essence of D's theory is that success causes fitness, and that fitness causes success. If one calls oneself a Darwinist it must be because those connections between the two ideas are empirical, not logical.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> — are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at all the case? That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning, instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a measurement unit?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Indeed, we are
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of reproductive success”. As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the form of a name, so there must be something it names, that is a kind of causal force responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive success. And since there is one name, there must be some one kind of causal force it names.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Well, if we do believe that the relative success of every genetic type of organism is systematic then it has a cause. Now I suppose that it's possible that each instance of success has a different cause, in which we would have reduced Darwin's theory to, "whatever causes an animal's sucess causes its success". But I think even FW would rate that a tautology. To escape that bind, we have to find some class of relations that leads to success which is other than the class that leads to failure. And to be a proper Darwinian you have to at least be able to entertain the possibility that selection would produce something other than fitness and vice versa.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> — to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would never have occurred to me to that there is anyone making it.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Well, here we are. We stand before you. I have been making such a claim in print for 56 years, so either I have managed to pull the wool over many editors' and reviewr's eyes, or it has some resonance somewhere among biologists. I hope calling it "bizarre" isn't the first step toward putting your fingers in your ears and shrieking.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> .
>>>>>>> It seems very similar to taking an expression like “elan vital”, and saying that, since it has the shape of a name, there must be something it names.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Well, exactly! The example I like to use is the "dormitive virtue"..Years ago, before the dinosaurs, Lipton and I wrote a paper in which we talked about such expressions that purport to be explanatory but which include a reference to the explanandum within the explanans as "recursive". (eg. life is caused by the Life Force) The dormitive virtue was a place-holder for what came to be known as the very specific chemical properties of morphine. The Moliere play makes fun of people who imagine that the assignment of a placeholder has solved the problem. We thought of these place holders as serving to keep the goal in sight while scientists looked for it. Science consists a lot in filling in or dividing up these place holders. The progress in the identification of the AIDS virus is a wonderful example. See, if tempted, Comparative Psychology and the recursive nature of filter explanations <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fcommons.clarku.edu%2ffacultyworks%2f66%2f&c=E,1,k4G28ruXzTMikjk22fWt55DQZBrY8oTBaFPZetykCEmKkrdW7Zgm_InoVrTc91PCgHYC1XjdS7pzs2zz_HaX2PnsGuZtad3L3YiDf1g2E2bBiY5y9m0Lp_g,&typo=1>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> To me, those are strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that don’t have any semantic referents at all. They may as well be Chomsky’s “colorless green dreams” or something. I would not have imagined that there was anything anyone expected, beyond the working out of the mechanics of lots of cases of how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out some vast taxonomy that has no singular “essence” underneath it. That could well be my lack of empathy for how many other people think, like my lack of empathy for their thoughts about God (along with my ignorance about who is in the world).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Indeed. That would explain a lot. Please understand that I am a lifelong unbeliever. I am not even an atheist. My family had no interest in religion whatsoever. You might call me a religious Ignoramist. I have never been cuffed on the ears by nuns.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> — I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about Strong Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like people who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked about Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this reading of what you were writing.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Again, that explains a lot of our difficulties. But I beg to suggest that there is a more generous reading.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my long Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what population geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be left is EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and which isn’t interesting and wasn’t to your point. So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating that way? And are there really biologists operating that way?y
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Indeed there are. They are called comparative biologists, comparative anatomists,comparative ethologists, comparative physiologists, anybody who studies the form of classes of organisms in relation to their circumstances. Natural design didn't get eliminated by Darwinism; it got partially, and incompletely and in some cases wrongly explained by it. Some effort needs to be expended in finding out the degree to which natural design actually accounts for natural selection and vice versa. Please see Toward a Falsifiable Theory of Evolution <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fcommons.clarku.edu%2ffacultyworks%2f67%2f&c=E,1,uEqHnsI2N6agATrwVIuvnLowDECLxZG4KT5Za_GJiyC2lUxcNNve9iY0ZctgPVn2cXHp3MIF_4h0exfyKRO9KdPS6nCz0uerbqjb5nNIWBw,&typo=1>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Nick
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 2:17 PM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> DES -- I hate to drag you back into our den and maul you some more but your last post was fascinting to me and so akin to difficulties we have had with Elliott Sober and difficulties I have had understnding entropy (ugh) that I want to pursue them with you further
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> --for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the units (or dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified. Not sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model variables that we try to fit to them. I had taken the state of modern work to show that this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> — are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at all the case? That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning, instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a measurement unit? Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of reproductive success”. As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the form of a name, so there must be something it names, that is a kind of causal force responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive success. And since there is one name, there must be some one kind of causal force it names.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> — to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would never have occurred to me to that there is anyone making it. It seems very similar to taking an expression like “elan vital”, and saying that, since it has the shape of a name, there must be something it names. To me, those are strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that don’t have any semantic referents at all. They may as well be Chomsky’s “colorless green dreams” or something. I would not have imagined that there was anything anyone expected, beyond the working out of the mechanics of lots of cases of how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out some vast taxonomy that has no singular “essence” underneath it. That could well be my lack of empathy for how many other people think, like my lack of empathy for their thoughts about God (along with my ignorance about who is in the world).
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> — I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about Strong Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like people who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked about Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this reading of what you were writing.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> If the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my long Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what population geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be left is EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and which isn’t interesting and wasn’t to your point.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating that way?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> And are there really biologists operating that way?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On Wed, Apr 1, 2026 at 5:15 AM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Can I ask one last question? after which I promise I really will shut up:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> The content of EricC’s note below (about the key in a lock), reflecting back on things Nick said in the early posts about selection’s being a tautology, which got me started digging a hole, have bothered me through the night, and made me wonder if I can understand how I have been missing both-of-y’all’s point. Was it something like the following:?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> — for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the units (or dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified. Not sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model variables that we try to fit to them. I had taken the state of modern work to show that this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> — are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at all the case? That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning, instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a measurement unit? Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of reproductive success”. As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the form of a name, so there must be something it names, that is a kind of causal force responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive success. And since there is one name, there must be some one kind of causal force it names.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> — to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would never have occurred to me to that there is anyone making it. It seems very similar to taking an expression like “elan vital”, and saying that, since it has the shape of a name, there must be something it names. To me, those are strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that don’t have any semantic referents at all. They may as well be Chomsky’s “colorless green dreams” or something. I would not have imagined that there was anything anyone expected, beyond the working out of the mechanics of lots of cases of how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out some vast taxonomy that has no singular “essence” underneath it. That could well be my lack of empathy for how many other people think, like my lack of empathy for their thoughts about God (along with my ignorance about who is in the world).
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> — I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about Strong Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like people who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked about Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this reading of what you were writing.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> If the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my long Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what population geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be left is EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and which isn’t interesting and wasn’t to your point.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating that way?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> And are there really biologists operating that way?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> As always, I appreciate whatever patience or indulgence,
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Eric
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> On Mar 31, 2026, at 15:47, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> I'm a bit confused here...
>>>>>>>>>> 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!"
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> 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.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> So.... where does that leave us? Is everyone now onboard with the metaphors mattering quite a bit?
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> 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.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> 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.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Best,
>>>>>>>>>> Eric
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> <mailto:echarles at american.edu>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 6:10 AM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> Hi Nick,
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> Two smaller replies to what have become two sub-threads:
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> > On Mar 30, 2026, at 15:42, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> >
>>>>>>>>>>> > DES, EPC, FW
>>>>>>>>>>> >
>>>>>>>>>>> > 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.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> As usual, let’s decamp to more neutral ground in the hope of having an ordinary negotiation.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> 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 “events” 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 “very little prior information” about some phenomenon that we can, nonetheless, still reasonably unambiguously circumscribe.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> But a quick inspection shows that a subset of the participants (who all together seem to be called “athletes”) are given metal disks and stand on some kind of 3-tiered podium, while other athletes do not. Being a statistician — a skill so helpful in the study of metaphor that it was worth taking the time out to learn — 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 “winners” (or better, “medalists”, this “winning” thing is a finer sub-partition; I’ll mis-use “winner” to label the most salient marking for this little parable). It’s 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.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> You also note that while there is only one 3-tiered podium and metal-disk set per one “event”, there seem to be many such distinct “events”, so some kind of event name gives you a second kind of marking you can put on the athletes. Moreover, interestingly, the “event” 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 “event” set, and it appears that no athlete is in more than one of them. As with the “winners” 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.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> Now, I can make a list of statements that seem to be of two different kinds (scare quotes here indicate my statisticians’ attribute labels; in my condition of very little prior knowledge, I don’t claim I have any more semantics for them than I listed above):
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> 1. Every “winner" is someone marked as having won something.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> 2a. Every winner in the “gymnastics” event is shorter than the average over all the participants;
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> 2b. Every winner in the “high jump” event is taller than the average over all the participants;
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> … (we could presumably look for other such summary statistics that seem to be unusually regular and to carry different values in different “events”).
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> I would say sentence 1 is “a tautology”, or close enough to it for the purpose of this negotiation. Maybe I should use EricC’s good, and slighly more flexible term, “truism”.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> Now you may write a protest email: But the sentences 2a, 2b, have not told me what constitutes “competition” in these “events”: “gymnastics” and “high jump”, and given me the rule book for scoring them. Okay. And they didn’t 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 “causal” theory through statistical inference is like the Road to Heaven: narrow, tortuous, and inadequate to many things one can rightly want to know. That’s what other sciences are then for.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> But if you claim: The sentences 2a and 2b didn’t give me _any information_ about these “events”, and couldn’t 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.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> The above parable is, of course, about selection. I didn’t 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’s 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’s answer): that I didn’t 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 “deterioration of the environment”, as Steve Frank (and I think also Price) lays out. They are probably not well-analogized to “mutation”, but in genetics, mutation also goes into the same bin in the Price equation — _outside_ the term of Fisher’s fundamental theorem — as the “deterioration” effects. The accounting identity is flexible enough that we don’t need analogies to use it; we can formulate a version for whatever statistics our phenomenon-of-interest supplies.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> 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’t tell the difference between those and sentence 1? In the world where I live, I don’t see evidence for this mistake.
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> Eric
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>>>> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>>>>>>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>>>>>>>> Clark University
>>>>>>>> nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu>
>>>>>>>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,TtGHguBztcaI183g6Goerj-O4VoUmgxpx6RFwy76dnUtcD6dMcEs2GfRLne1FYCYIv9JZQ_Qlp0DYwPIxqwUF0P5yyaODACw5wXNyxIS_4NA3OoABA1XdQ,,&typo=1>
>>>>>>>> https://substack.com/@monist <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fsubstack.com%2f%40monist&c=E,1,mMVE-osMfLMKveVRGsDNOLbCQxE2gtCfa9lLV-tXT5ooNLpQD3mqsdWZrYkDx7mKJDcf7XYJbAAs76SMkAt7fhk6zh8pI_xm2uaiDg2olbukzFktpA,,&typo=1>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>>>>>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>>>>>>> Clark University
>>>>>>> nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu>
>>>>>>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,2XwwB39XAWBxm8sZIiJJtQaGopoq86JnxTvN46gGqo6aH0noWqqKl_l7rB_k-DozfW1XYaJks5IPwIsYhgQEFcMMYaST1TtrgzyaPODraxU,&typo=1>
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>>>>>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>>>>>>> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>>>>>
>>>>>> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
>>>>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>>>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,EHRAq7ghLpjsl4ZHF55qmSa36UhxkealN7ABfO5qkV1J2Mu-lYC4DrN5c9FnHwPRLggzrNN6rWaSOsNed8iBIyLpQVXv1Rorh78hIsygsvEtQ-gJ03xn58aZUZ2Y&typo=1>
>>>>>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,CPvtQP2Uq9O6hx6OoaGqvcOng_hflp90R4THZAMnk-bf2VdAlQHEaFMMukttoZR2uyYsZgR26YJosoJyZ-dw7iTGPHXyIAlnuaqMN8_mLVj8za6HIQln1mmHQapE&typo=1>
>>>>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,b3AvXhVEy1N77hAdXidLqY4OnlxMl_fkKC4MfVp9DHPWwtZDZjxApEeZrUcZw35Dve69osD9oJEpNlPcXDkCs7aZTCrlkMPel65x03DIYwaqmCcXTc5c&typo=1>
>>>>>> archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,eFxPkHDLGdpdeTO-gztrhV4LEU-uCg8Vl8HgGV-NYUbjcqSv9dEjbcOW599M-ZdEWWYP_ahE2rpzPG6T4mNxVaoyagEc53ho0qfIezO1GwnGWEy0i95YVw,,&typo=1>
>>>>>> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>>>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>>>>> Clark University
>>>>> nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu>
>>>>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,yOlkmrrUeTaGeYex3-BP2up_KTKEECrDeXyMl2bn9HMBnlqmOWOhGvMQOKYLoybbMqLzqnZSs7-_jUa1hkV7hkzl30kqZYwyMpt1XgLahOOdGMUu_KCS&typo=1>
>>>>> https://substack.com/@monist <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fsubstack.com%2f%40monist&c=E,1,sECLaBy8NN4JIxn0K_XdKJaqDL_5f-DBJjVXY18AdRfpb1OgG3a0kH415SIPlY-o8cIJxjTizTCnZ6jKbQKh39BkP19S9307-0f-Ic2zdY6d&typo=1>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
>>>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,tC0PdYiCVSRc7b8jz4x7Yig5Hz71QYRfF3irlQEjCQChVMEQeyRN9YpFygqtdMjjNaAY26D2u5JvjHK-zYJYexEHINcvJUeaY1w-_Oh9zuU78r-Vy2mwuJHIdvnH&typo=1
>>>>> to (un)subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,2jJpuVLI2AmmQBLt5lXMu7iYyu1XmT5ctf5oDB0lgfOJhgZFy9kEb5BrFx8O8jEnVxJiV8UKNrvg45SI5-G0cNgA8zmL9lA54oNbx1TwbTkm0RE,&typo=1
>>>>> FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,YtDpEX1fabSs1AlCN26XsY-EWjggWd8DwKaaGy4-VIPf0iFrJLBmyul8mQ5A7Q2Btig_DA8y8zKiI4bE9mWoTBg_21KyKki9nm5aCZijj-OY-rl5iliL&typo=1
>>>>> archives: 5/2017 thru present https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,NvWsaA57CgBqzhKbNfM7nTbeUEIi3Nz3UaZ__wXB6K9DGDMn3mhCOKtx-Y5A9I84BYiPEgB3aTVYkxRGfBJEFfhZoK6HEIhqbrDn_FY5&typo=1
>>>>> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>>>
>>>> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
>>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,6MpM6UflHGaTaCBanfqlnos6ei0U2Vd4yDnzvLjIXypUQMRH100mWPFbjY6jlCJngwQ4wdgMbWiiPHKgvpi4IuOAdJXILBkfrlq83v2NA70,&typo=1>
>>>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,avpTb6wUGkod0qnrevgp4F9bwXW1W6NjB8s--iAAceHZNq5-bOLkpPcYBy1yWhlqMA1iVoEIBAU0dTh-2qArCZJVAGppesAAXJmfykcd&typo=1>
>>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,Kag6XhJ9drjmTfrlbyL66QZ0JkP1NHcoBPx3x9ieALMTBjxGocDtXzDc1PE_GDtpb-QE10YLumlBWaYChtPRVhSH_oM7zzBfyiEQvive&typo=1>
>>>> archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,dAuFeGBIttDUdafPlWywAYYAYTqLd2iF9LscrTjBYsm2dmVTIT6RE_xWT7BgWy4aePeBrzWHKUwXfPzFFy5BQe751h4KzSjaUkInzEGR7fA4-qZ3Xw,,&typo=1>
>>>> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>>> Clark University
>>> nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu>
>>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,MjGEKE-qCn0sr7aZEWZpV5yD3dPSGSc-SHMGvLwjs_8d-BeBuDKKeM9OmftvQOPMpHHj1loiaLEh3Epboo2hVOMe9lvn_aUTvjgxRNrxD4e0GzRLZP_xUC2q6a0,&typo=1>
>>> https://substack.com/@monist <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fsubstack.com%2f%40monist&c=E,1,wjZAue81CLywwLi4wpVYRB6H73q5Dzr5PBFC0ySU5Lo-YSaXjoCZalt7uqLLBdDVQOD58P2ATFsBiOfCYR_CU7Qc4_3E_bJv9E0qMkg1DS0,&typo=1>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,hIykhZ22Rj6EKkKb93w96H8xU4m1_TJZA3W77j2ALO0UcevqYa78vLj9GjYuUrHBUjQtBQ4p2azpW30frx8ahm1scHd6Yh0yeQ-tQnfmdA,,&typo=1
>>> to (un)subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,4gwxjI9mJSHQguvWRUw6H1FkwtLk5ffZZemk5VAR2uib81yxCs5ZWng1NRjR7VLWmDzrBviwS9ylWdEuTMONHiaR-C6L8fskdFWcmh7rH0cilQQ2&typo=1
>>> FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,wozIInWS0_ekUsMv9hSizs_fOaWXcD9qwS51JlAi0rpKLaD88LA2RROMDx6idS6Ja05hH5vvdjcyuneRxOCYS3EqV8YfdaAfCcxUNQqaykjSrzrPfsrc1O3N-g,,&typo=1
>>> archives: 5/2017 thru present https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,13Q7sSZWo-9yHJ2MGNu6JQMB98SoMIPEULpeHUzW3BPK8JhLrBAHkHaFsAs-4w5YCdMfv-yCQ5fFKJGRREjT2xvPI0wPM7QNdJR0UcJOEYS3VCE24ck,&typo=1
>>> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>
>> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,a3-xlEi_E-aPso4uOiG7BohCi1YNul4md_l_lpYVtyoN16isXtPEvQMc7i1HNiEeTzGmQhW7-vfGxXKuplBQfdSULkfA_vn5gyYPUcbm&typo=1>
>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,KQ6OcLoOrBDTYnGszdizx8aPbHRFSxXes_1ckZk9ssFDvKgXkr2S8G16i5b5fhZGytpx7ecTMI_jL7hMR4PYq8qG2Dzu4x37c-JYT4AIIxMtB5g,&typo=1>
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,YeQ9A8mvUeiWv0sTZsdmzLkGCkFMVPylPhT2MqVvLrsURW276FM-M1bWAOkR09bQEqZvM8cRXnbc7tTUu2EuhFeudTgYV4iWz3cuJi4YBN1TzVMIYBXhfiAEkA,,&typo=1>
>> archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,MYwpZGLY3n8HT9-BxEtuNPqRcGEEF3fUVtya9TP3OdSDMReiZDcy9w_2n0ld5Ntmeagzekm9M71bCiU1QVd0UcgsplPEHReTFTQ5GH_-Ajg,&typo=1>
>> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,bzRbYQCiX0OgNQ-myod7m_c477XwMaVsBDXlNXCCgUCPYPZJB_NlqMdT2ml6MoJuZFnbmckDXz3iWJ-9tR8iU0LeTHjDR7M2byiSkiRfHfJIdA7Ke5u18PE,&typo=1
> to (un)subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,HdQ-6VJgX5aGe2ZUXxxj51HwuflECxpPuYmrpQbsS5giRyJiGsx60j42DOlS0veHvqnz2PwwUK6gDHJcv2syluG8w-o3GZP8yAVyjoceqRDiVi1tLqDQtA,,&typo=1
> FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,Kv4xBp3Luuaa2N2pZ0i1SrNwkBWPuMDkb0xA2zxQy2QtXFUim1l-KIs4A6Rj5-JjtDq6WkS07YOHxPdI2CtzCtkyD6_8SUKW_fZdOW4kJDqF2Jtb_nzWG20b91b2&typo=1
> archives: 5/2017 thru present https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,yprtPGYfz5P_QZ-LXbIq9dJp9Ikr7COBl2cCNH2G2lBA7CxHzE8gBPBYHjbOUlnNg0STk0QCraV_reI2ve2TTBDBTdM8hy_tG0HGs2uLO4cEzQ,,&typo=1
> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
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