Re: What is the concept of fitness ?

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008 03:45:28 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by backspace
<sawireless2000@xxxxxxxxx>:

On Jun 30, 11:55 pm, Bob Casanova <nos...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
For a truism to be false, some things that
are incontestible - in this case that favourable traits become more
widely distributed in subsequent generations - have to be false, and
nobody says they are.

Other than noting the traits become more widely distributed how was
their favoribility measured ?

Other than noting that questions such as this one indicate
you have the mental acuity of a bag of rocks, how is your
idiocy measured?

Why is it so difficult to spot the tautology by Wilkins ?

Because it's not a tautology. If traits are favorable they
will increase in occurrence in a population. It was observed
that these traits increased in occurrence in the population,
leading to the conclusion that these traits are favorable.
Where's the tautology?

Lets go
through this slowly. He says that there were traits that became
common. Sure, the question is why did they become more common. He says
because they were "favorable" , well obviously because if they weren't
favorable they wouldn't have become common! Telling us that traits
became common implicitly implies that they had to be favorable, how
could they possibly not be favorable? Telling us that because traits
are common therefore they are favorable doesn't tell us independently
the actual reason they became more common. This needs to be derived
elsewhere. Why did polar bears became more common in the arctic ?
Because they had "favorable" traits, well obviously otherwise they
would be dead now wouldn't they.

OK, so what's the problem? Are you contending that any
explanation for an observation (which is what this is) is
tautologous?
--

Bob C.

"Evidence confirming an observation is
evidence that the observation is wrong."
- McNameless

.

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