Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Fitness: Philosophical Problems, Grant Ramsey, Charles H. Pence
Fitness: Philosophical Problems, Grant Ramsey, Charles H. Pence
Faculty Publications
Fitness plays many roles throughout evolutionary theory, from a measure of populations in the wild to a central element in abstract theoretical presentations of natural selection. It has thus been the subject of an extensive philosophical literature, which has primarily centred on the way to understand the relationship between fitness values and reproductive outcomes. If fitness is a probabilistic or statistical quantity, how is it to be defined in general theoretical contexts? How can it be measured? Can a single conceptual model for fitness be offered that applies to all biological cases, or must fitness measures be case-specific? Philosophers have …
Staffan Müller-Wille And Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History Of Heredity, Charles H. Pence
Staffan Müller-Wille And Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History Of Heredity, Charles H. Pence
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
A New Foundation For The Propensity Interpretation Of Fitness, Charles H. Pence, Grant Ramsey
A New Foundation For The Propensity Interpretation Of Fitness, Charles H. Pence, Grant Ramsey
Faculty Publications
The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that avoids these (and other) counterexamples. By producing a counterexample-free model of the PIF, we call into question one of …