Category: General Relativity

Deriving Natural Selection = Fitness × Acceleration

As you can see from my previous post, I now have postulated a direct relation between Natural Selection and Fitness (N.S.=F.×A.).  This relation follows from the theory. The short short short version of the theory is this general postulate: one organism’s traits are another’s environment and vice versa.  Hence all competition can be viewed as environmental phenomena.  This gives Natural Selection as a result of Fitness and an environmental factor, which I refer to as […]

Rewrite of Evolution

New theory of evolution!  Hooray! Patched a bunch of things together to make a nice story.  Fixed the little issue about fitness being circular.  Expanded natural selection to apply more generally.  Causal structure.  Epistemological foundations.  ooOoOO0Ooooooo. And it’s good fun.  I swear.  Epistemology, history of physics, evolution… makes me happy.  You should really read it. Download here. [pdf, 304kb]

Hypotheses Natura Non Fingo

Newton famously wrote [1] [2]: I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses…  It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies. as a response to those who challenged him to provide causes of gravity.  He said, […]

Dismantling Fodor’s Argument

Fodor argued that the theory of evolution is not a legitimate theory of science because it is either vacuously true or wrong.  He accused Darwin of committing the intentional fallacy. (synopsis here) Insofar as he made no logical mistakes in his reasoning, we need a different strategy to defend the theory of evolution.  In this post I will argue that his argument is an instance of gerneral underdetermination, and hence not a problem of evolution […]

Relativity in Biology notes from 2005

It’s always interesting to see the start of ideas. Although I don’t have anything from the Spring of ’04 when I recall realizing biorelativity for the first time, I have found a file with a ‘last modified’ date of June12, ’05, the contents of which are below: Quantum Biology biology: the study of the physical attributes of life. the rate of mutation is constant, much as the speed of light organisms mutate. light shines. hence […]

Evolutionary Drift, revisited yet again

With my recent paper on Measuring Fitness I realize that my previous responses to evolutionary drift, though not incorrect, may have not stated the solution particularly clearly. When fitness is defined and measured as described in the aforementioned article, evolutionary drift is irrelevant. The method of measuring the fitness of an organism or species makes no reference to any mutations whatsoever. Therefore evolutionary drift is no problem for the theory of fitness described here. If […]

Measuring Fitness

The basic premise is to measure fitness in a conceptually similar way to how we measure mass.  To measure mass we can use a scale to compare the effect of gravity on a test object to an object with an agreed upon mass, or we can compare the test object’s resistance to acceleration as compared to an object with an agreed upon mass.  These methods measure the ‘gravitational’ mass and ‘inertial mass’ respectively. Gravitational Mass […]

General Relativity in Evolutionary Biology DRAFT

EDIT, July 2015: See the full draft at the phil-sci archive: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/11557/ Also check out my other Research. Below are old notes: —- I’ve discussed relativity in evolutionary biology with regards to uniform change but, as with the Special Theory of Relativity in physics, we want a theory that covers all change. This means that insofar as relativity applies to biology under uniform motion, i.e. when a species is reproducing in a regular fashion, we […]