Tag: 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, […]

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 […]