Tam Hunt
Tam Hunt
Aug 24, 2017 · 1 min read

Hi Phil, I’ve never found Gould’s response to Bethell in terms of the latter’s critique of natural selection very helpful. I wrote in a 2014 article on these topics: “How can we know what constitutes fitness as an a priori matter? It seems, rather, that the only way we can know what constitutes fitness, as a general matter, is by operationalizing the definition of fitness, that is, by looking at what actually survives in actual populations. We can conduct lab experiments and bioengineering experiments to attempt to measure various possible adaptations and their fitness, but we can never know what a given trait’s actual impact on fitness is until we examine it in actual populations, either in the lab or in the wild. This is not a priori.” Curious of your response to my take on Gould. Here’s the full article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594354/.

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    Tam Hunt

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