[FRIAM] Metaphor... and more...

[Frank Wimberly]

Not a tautology.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 6:29 AM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Let me summarize my last horrible send in a line:
>
> "Traits are predictive of reproductive success, and reproductive success
> is the amplifier or attenuator of trait frequencies."
>
> I don’t see any argument that the above sentence is tautological.  And I
> don’t hear anybody serious making any other claim than the above sentence.
>
> My apologies to you all for thisAM….
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> On Mar 30, 2026, at 6:53, Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
>
> I was on the point of trying to answer Nick a few days ago, while also
> acknowledging that since I haven’t had time to read his paper, I should
> keep it short.
>
> It is helpful that EricC has posted in the meantime, because I often
> believe I can understand what he means by something, whereas with Nick I
> often read things that seem kinda familiar, but then I find some sentence
> that Nick writes following a “therefore”, and I am baffled by what logic he
> thinks that follows from, making me realize I probably didn’t understand
> what he “actually meant” by the earlier sentences either.
>
> But I will try a short in-line here, with EricC’s version, which is what I
> was guessing Nick might have meant a few days ago when he said:
>
> This literature you cite often fails to make a distinction between
> evolution as a theory and the theory that explains evolution.  Evolution as
> a theory holds that organisms have descended through the ages they have
> become modified to the circumstances of their existence. It is a thesis
> about the causes of descent with modification.  Natural selection is a
> theory offered in explanation of that pattern of descent.  The literature
> you describe has often fused these two metaphors into one and therefore is
> fundamentally unfalsifiable as a theory that explains evolution.
>
>
> Here I was completely mystified what argument Nick understood himself to
> be making.  Particularly referring to “the literature I cite”, since I sent
> him George Price’s The Nature of Selection, which (in the actual print of
> the article) says nothing of the kind.
>
> Put aside that I couldn’t track what the “two” were, or in what sense
> either was a “metaphor”, other than that Nick labels them (and all other
> words; man with a hammer) as such.
>
> Anyway, moving on as promised:
>
> On Mar 30, 2026, at 0:41, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I think this (EricS's reply) speaks to the "formalism" issue, and the
> value of the "flavor text".
>
> One of the big problems in evolutionary theory over the last century came
> from the desire for a very particular type of formalism, in which terms are
> all inter-defined, and as such, statements made within the system can't be
> "wrong" in an empirical sense. The classic example (so Nick and I assert in
> the incipient book) is the equation  [image: {\displaystyle s=1-W}] where
> s stands for "selection" and W is "fitness". This has been in biology
> textbooks of a certain sort for well over half a century, and leads to
> Dawkins's "Selfish Gene" talk, among other things. It's hard to criticize
> on the surface, but, unfortunately, once you do that, you cannot usefully
> study the relationship between fitness and selection, because
> that-they-are-related becomes a truism!
>
>
> I _would_ have asked Nick: "What do you mean: is it that the sentence
> `adaptedness is an outcome of natural selection' is a tautology, amounting
> to nothing more than `fit are the fit'?”  I was guessing that might have
> been Nick’s meaning, and it sounds like EricC’s meaning here.
>
> I will take your word for the presence of bad writing and nonsense in
> evolutionary textbooks a century ago (probably today, too; the ability of
> many scientists to render coherent logic in ordinary English is often not
> something to be proud of).  And I think I can remember somebody with a
> biology degree (so journals are required to publish him), who writes
> something like this (was it Pigliucci?  If not, I apologize to him for
> bringing in his name.)
>
> But if that is the complaint, it seems to me that that ship had sailed
> already with Fisher, though he was so cryptic and imperious in his writing
> and his personal style, that it had to wait 40 years for George Price to
> explain to the rest of the community what Fisher was saying (and per Glen,
> much more importantly, _doing_).  Steve Frank has written fairly well on
> this; or at least, that is where I got it.  (I don’t know which of a
> half-dozen papers might be the cleanest source to recommend here.)  In any
> case, if people didn’t know it had sailed in 1930 or 1958, they certainly
> should have known it had sailed by 1972 or 1990 (when Frank found Price’s
> 1972 manuscript and published it).  de facto, most of the working
> literature that has content already makes use of its having sailed, even if
> they don’t remark on it, because they use Price Equations as accounting
> identifies (among other organizing systems).
>
> If one is going to assert that there is nothing but tautology in what
> population geneticists compute, and therefore they don’t ever predict
> anything — a tautology can’t — then I would say that requires ignoring all
> the main content of what one is reading in a very large number of papers.
> There is an entire causal/predictive structure, and it can very much be
> wrong in its imputations.  Often, the sources of being wrong can come from
> things biologists don’t front as important elements of cause, where I argue
> they should, so the things that are wrong can also be interesting.
>
> What then am I claiming is the non-tautological content, which is there
> over and over and over in tons of papers, which Fisher gestured at
> unhelpfully in English, but partly did a very important thing with in math,
> which Steve Frank acceptably describes, and which Price made didactic?
>
> 1. First, obviously, we get rid of horoscope-style and Humpty-Dumpty-style
> language.  We know that “fitness” can’t be doing much work in a causal
> account if all it means is “I look at them, and they seem to be happy”, or
> if it is meant to be a synonym for the even worse attributive: “design”.
>  (Remember the important part of the Vampire lore: they have to be invited
> in!)  We have to actually say _what we mean a predictive theory to be
> predicting_.   So the attempt to formalize fitness as “reproductive
> success, absolute or relative, according to parent type”, is the
> declaration of the observable to be the anchor for empiricism.  If you
> like, the “instrument” that is to be employed.
>
> 1a.  Now, declaring an observable can’t in itself be “wrong” in Popper’s
> sense, because it isn’t a logical conclusion.  What it can be, however, is
> incoherent, and thus a gesture at a definition, which can’t ever be made
> into an actual definition.  This is the important thing that Fisher did
> correctly and explained horribly: making the point that “fitness” must be
> formalized as a summary statistic (that’s a technical term, not a
> metaphor!) of your high-dimensional observable.  The question of when you
> are _even saying anything_ turns on when your summary statistic is
> coherently definable.  Wherever it is coherently defined, it _cannot_ be
> “falsifiable”, because now we clearly have a definition that is a
> completely different kind of thing than a putative derived conclusion.
>
> 1b.  Next, since heredity plays out in diverse ways in different groups,
> summary statistics defined for one won’t generally be defined for others.
> Fisher, being a King, in many of the worst senses, and being out to capture
> territory (negatively spun) and solve prediction problems (positively
> spun), defined a variety of summary statistics from histories that are
> sequences of population states connected through reproduction.  They aren’t
> all the same, and they are not all capable of carrying the same “meanings”.
>   (I’ll get to what that word means in a moment.)
>
> 1c.  For objects that are suitably described as “replicators” (technical
> term, not metaphor!), there is a fitness summary statistic that can also be
> assigned as an attribute (just, a marking) of individual organisms.  For
> organisms that reproduce sexually, or via a variety of complex lifecycles,
> the summary statistics that Fisher defined to carry the label “fitness”
> _cannot_ be assigned as attributes to any organism, because they are
> computed from whole-population counts.  So quite apart from what you think
> you gain by “marking” an individual organism with an attribute (the
> bacterial cells carrying this allele have left 14.32 live daughters per
> starting cell in 6 generations in this laboratory instantiation of a
> population dynamic), for these sexual-lifecycle summary statistics, you
> can’t even do that much.
>
> 1d,  Just btw (a thing nobody has any reason to care about), this is where
> it is productive to go after Fisher, and the generations that don’t extend
> beyond him in their methods.  His summary statistics are well-defined, so
> one can’t deny that.  But they are not _all_ the summary statistics one
> might try, and there are others (also well-defined) that can be
> constructed, which do a better job of marking organisms and life-stages
> than Fisher’s fitnesses do, and support all the same Price-like
> decompositions. That’s the kind of thing I do.
>
> 2. So at the end of all the “1” points above, we have an actual observable
> that we have committed to, and that we intend some “theory” to explain or
> predict in some way.  The whole content of a predictive theory is the
> assertion that organisms have attributes in the here-and-now (variously
> termed “traits”), which support prediction of the distributions of our
> fitness summary statistics as time unfolds.  Again, those attributes aren’t
> vague gestures like “seems to be doing well”; they should be things one can
> commit to somehow: it is dark or light in color; it has softer or harder
> shells or teeth or claws; etc.
>
> 2a. Geneticists try to capture the idea that traits in the here-and-now
> are predictive of fitnesses as realized histories unfold, by defining
> sample estimators for those dependencies in the form of regressions.
> Again, if a regression is defined, there can’t be anything “true” or
> “false” about it; it is just a definition.
>
> 3. The Evolutionists, for some time, have built up terminology around all
> this.  Samir Okasha’s book uses it (among other things) as a skeleton.  I
> don’t enjoy the way they say it, but if one is trying to follow their
> arguments, the terms are enough to do that.  The summary-statistic
> definition of the observable is what they call “realized fitness”, and the
> regression model on traits in the here-and-now is what they call the
> “propensity interpretation”.  Yuck; but don’t shoot the messenger.  I
> probably wouldn’t have coined those terms.
>
> 3a.  It seems pretty inescapable to me that realized fitness and a
> regression model on traits cannot be tautologically related, as one
> requires diachronic observation even to assign, while the other is
> assignable (for any fixed choice of regression coefficients) from a
> population state at a single time.  (It treats the population composition
> as a Markov state.)
>
> 3b.  Note that EricC’s s = 1-W above never entered any of what I said.  If
> a selection coefficient is defined in some way as an algebraic function of
> offspring numbers, that is just a layer of notation.  The existence of both
> realized values W (convertible to realized values s), and model-predicted
> expectations for W, derived from model-incorporated coefficients s, means
> that the algebra isn’t meant to do other than convenience work _within_
> either layer, and the causal argument concerns the fitting of models to
> sample data.  If textbook writers render this reality badly, then fine: go
> after them.  But the flu designers who estimate what should go into an
> annual vaccine don’t deserve to be tarred with that brush.
>
> 4. Finally we can get to the point of what they claim to be doing, and in
> competent papers, are doing:  Are their regression models predictive, and
> are they robust against things that the modeler didn’t notice, but that
> could have been included?  Hashing out that question is the whole content
> of the scientific literature and program.
>
> 5. Where is conflation an actual hazard in the world I live in,
> what-exactly is being conflated, and how might it get something wrong?
>  (So, we have established falsifiable and in that sense meaningful; now I
> am talking about false and thus interesting.)  Well, people might identify
> a trait that they think confers a tendency to leave more offspring.  They
> might even be right in their identification.  All that is on the
> “propensity” side.  The place they can err is in supposing that, if they
> have identified a cause for a tendency, then they can be assured of an
> outcome in the same direction (a wrongful binding of the “propensity” term
> to the “realized” term), and the only uncertainty will be the scale of the
> outcome effect.  This is an error I think evolutionary biologists often do
> commit in their informal language, even though the math in any paper
> wouldn’t let them get away with it, so they don’t do it there.  Others, not
> even evolutionary biologists, but a kind of groupie of the biologists from
> other domains in science, commit this error of supposition and express it
> frequently in bar-quality conversation (I have a certain conversation in a
> NASA working group in mind as I write this.)  The slip between the cup of
> propensity, and the lip of realized outcomes, which biologists don’t
> account for as fully as I think they should, is illustrated nicely by
> magnetism:  The “tendency” for spins to align in solid-phase Iron is
> identical at all temperatures.  However, when the iron is too hot, the
> spins don’t macroscopically align “just a little”; rather, they don’t align
> macroscopically at all.  Then, upon cooling just a little below the
> critical temperature, they do macroscopically align, and the alignment
> rapidly becomes “a lot” with separation of temperature below the critical
> value.  All this is the lesson about counting that we learned from
> thermodynamics.  And while the things being counted in evolution (completed
> lifecycles) are different from the things counted in equilibrium thermo
> (pairs of aligned spins), the counting argument applies equally well.
>
>
> Anyway…. Sorry for so many words.  I hope that I have given enough here to
> explain why I am baffled when I hear modern people claim that “adaptation
> occurs through natural selection” is “unfalsifiable”.
>
> The thing about where Dawkins goes wrong is another story, best told by
> not quoting his own words, because he is such a rhetorician (even though
> his earlier work suggests that he is capable of arguing properly).  But it
> branches out of the points above, just on the point of mis-representing
> summary statistics that cannot be object-attributes, as if they were object
> attributes, and then, having set up that strawman, arguing that the only
> recourse is to throw the whole thing out above the level of the gene, and
> ignore that all the same problems continue to occur for genes, becoming
> quite serious in the deeper past.  All that can totally be sorted out;
> there are no fatal confusions, and metaphor isn’t tripping up anybody who
> wants to speak and argue carefully.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
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