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| ▲ | fluidcruft 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| The flip side is everything is being degraded by random mutation. It's like holding a large ball in place on a hill that sees frequent tremors. If the ball is still halfway up the hill it's being held in place, if it's being held in place it's still halfway up the hill. It might be considered a tautology if you're only working with symbols and ignore all the mechanistics. |
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| ▲ | Symmetry an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not a tautology but a definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology) |
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| ▲ | bcjdjsndon an hour ago | parent [-] | | But other than it surviving, there's no way to define fitness. | | |
| ▲ | Symmetry 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's more reproducing than surviving. If the population of some species increases and the number of copies of some allele remains constant we could consider than gene less fit than the other alleles, in the population genetics sense. So it's frequency rather than survival that geneticists look at. But that proves that there are indeed other ways that they could have defined fitness if they wanted to. | |
| ▲ | johngossman 16 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is correct. Biology uses the term fit slightly different than the general public |
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| ▲ | nine_k an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Whatever does not survive stops registering in later times; most of the time, what helps survival is retained, and what helps survival is what increases fitness. |
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| ▲ | taeric 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | As stated, this feels wrong. Specifically, it does not account for traits being appropriate for environment. I like to say it as what was needed for one stage could be the problem for the next stage. That is, traits that stop registering may no longer be something that helps survival. But that does not mean they were not necessary for survival at an earlier point. |
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