tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8148573551417578681.post2647012186045013591..comments2024-03-27T19:47:13.475-07:00Comments on Dark Buzz: Philosophers confused over causalityRogerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03474078324293158376noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8148573551417578681.post-7318899224231945772020-11-21T00:34:23.371-08:002020-11-21T00:34:23.371-08:00Fascinating! This was posted on a Friday in 2015, ...Fascinating! This was posted on a Friday in 2015, today is a Saturday in 2020 and ... it could just be yesterday. Physics makes progress, philosophy makes paper mountains. Just mention Plato, and there's the next 5,000 pages you are looking at, in recapitulation Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07362918807018007774noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8148573551417578681.post-941359341088905492015-11-06T15:15:22.188-08:002015-11-06T15:15:22.188-08:00Roger,
In this particular case he is actually corr...Roger,<br />In this particular case he is actually correct. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is bogus as science and bad as theory.<br /><br /> In all honesty, 'survival of the fittest' does not really mean much. Survival in this case is a statistically measurable strategy that works in a particular instance for a particular entity in a particular environment, but what may work in one situation for one organism does not mean it will work in another situation even with the same organism. The word 'fittest' is utterly useless as well, since it implies somehow that completely different survival strategies can be directly compared, they can't, as once again the comparisons would have to be made oranges to oranges, apples to apples, and you aren’t doing that with a such a squishy generality. One organism might be faster and escape its predator, another might fly to escape a non flying enemy, but another organism might have a defense mechanism of some kind (poison, armor, toxic smell, claws, etc), yet another might be capable of camouflaging itself to avoid detection, or somehow confuse its predators into considering it more dangerous than it actually is, or that it would taste bad, As I understand it, one particularly ridiculous life form actually started getting fat headed allowing it to outthink its natural predators but to the point it started to kill the females of the species because their birth canals couldn't accommodate the cranial size , imagine that! So unless what you are comparing is in a very narrow spectrum in a very narrow situation with a very narrow definition of success, like male marathon runners of a certain age in the the same well defined competition, you got squat for a comparison you could even use the term 'fittest' to describe. If I compare a male sprinter with a female marathon runner, how does that go? What if you have a male eighteen year old runner competing with a female twelve year old trivia savant on jeopardy? Where’s your concept of fittest anymore outside of a silly contest of similar contestants? It’s utterly meaningless as a concept outside of contrived situations. Horse betting is about making simple concrete predictions of outcomes of similar life forms in a similar competition of strategy and yet you would not call it a science, and outside of animal husbandry (which is about genetics and heredity not evolution theory) evolution theory has nothing to say or do with it. <br />CFTnoreply@blogger.com