In <9401111452.AA01893 at net.bio.net> LYONSW at UCONNVM.bitnet (James) writes:
>James replies:
>double huh? You could (as many ecologists do) argue that a measure of an
>organism's success is their ability to produce genes (which, if expanded
>with the umbrella statement to: fitness may be measured as the number of
>genes an individual can manage to thrust into the next generation regardless
>of who carries them relative to the number of genes evryone else succeeds
>in thrusting encompasses the relative nature of success as well as
>inclusive fitness,(large breath) and thus prove my point that an individual
>is comprised of many parts, one of which is DNA, some of which are genes,
>and that the credit for success belongs neither to genes, nor species, but to
>individuals who comprise species wholly and are part gene.
you definately could measure an organism's success as you claim. in fact if
i were inclined to measure an organism's success that's probably how i'd go
about it. however, i'm not so inclined. my interests are in explaining
adaption and organismal success is a misleading piece of information in that
pursuit. if you reconsider what you've written i'm sure you'll want to amend
what you say anyways, i.e. whose gene's are you talking about anyways? by your
formulation the organism that is ravaged by viruses and other pathogens thereby
producing a large number of genes is more successful than the organism that is
resistant to infection. i've no doubt you can tidy that up, but the question
still remains, which genes? you completely whitewash intragenomic conflict.
nuclear genes and cytoplasmic genes have dissimilar interests. granted, from
the organisms point of view your formulation of success is unaffected, but
you pay the cost of being unable to explain the adaptations that may (and i
would add, "have") result from this conflict. anyways, the original question
was which is the best measure of biological success, not organismal success.
for me, i'll interpret 'biological' as meaning 'genetic'.
the level of analysis aside, there still is the matter of what 'success' means.
here i'll simply make several logical leaps (and no doubt invalid ones at that)
and simply say that all human usage of the word 'success' reduce to 'fitness'
(except in cases were the use of success is analogical, where the analogy is
to situations where talk of fitness is meaningful), and fitness is best viewed
from the gene's eye view; hence, success = greatest amount of dna, or most
copies. further, from the gene's pov 'relative' means relative to other genes
period. higher order categories of organism, species, genus, phyla, are all
irrelevant. even humans and ants can share the same genes.
