I think this (EricS's reply) speaks to the "formalism" issue, and the value
of the "flavor text".
One of the big problems in evolutionary theory over the last century came
from the desire for a very particular type of formalism, in which terms are
all inter-defined, and as such, statements made within the system can't be
"wrong" in an empirical sense. The classic example (so Nick and I assert in
the incipient book) is the equation [image: {\displaystyle s=1-W}] where s
stands for "selection" and W is "fitness". This has been in biology
textbooks of a certain sort for well over half a century, and leads to
Dawkins's "Selfish Gene" talk, among other things. It's hard to criticize
on the surface, but, unfortunately, once you do that, you cannot usefully
study the relationship between fitness and selection, because
that-they-are-related becomes a truism!
I think this relates to a strong intellectual bias towards deduction (vice
induction or abduction), rooted in some version of geometry envy. People
don't like their ideas to feel vulnerable, and deductive logic (executed
correctly) basically guaranteed to be right. On the other hand, empirical
claims, when your terms are not inter-defined can be wrong.
The alternative (if anyone cares) is to empirically study how well an
organism fits its environment irrespective of its reproductive success, and
study reproductive success independent of indication of fit, and then see
if the two relate. Field biologists have been doing this for a very long
time, but it's much harder to do from an office desk. When one does this,
one finds that organisms fit their environments very well in many ways, and
don't fit in lots of other ways, and some of those ways seem to lead to
reproductive success and others don't. There are spandrils, exaptations,
changes in the environment to which organisms have not-yet adapted, and all
sorts of other things biologist understand quite well if we aren't pushing
the tautology. Thus we can observe that many types of sterile hybrids fit
their environments very well, with zero reproduction. We can also observe
that some species reproduce in huge numbers, while not fitting their
environments well at all (perhaps because a recent change in the
environment makes all offspring unlikely to survive).
In theory, staying clear on the metaphor should (should 🤷) make it harder
to formalize yourself into a tautology.
Best,
Eric
<[email protected]>
On Sat, Mar 28, 2026 at 4:49 AM Santafe <[email protected]> wrote:
> The passage EricC quotes below makes a good point about the
> non-stationarity of people’s knowledge and familiarities.
>
> Once I am mindful of that, I have to admit that there is a much bigger
> non-stationarity of their worldviews. There are things about Darwin’s
> contemporaries that would have dictated what his project was, that I guess
> I can “understand”, but for which I am incapable of any empathy.
>
> I don’t live in a world suffused by God. When I hear God-talk around me,
> I don’t suppose that there is something they mean, and that I have any idea
> what that is. I guess I experience them about like I would experience a
> pack of kids repeating 6-7 (if I knew the kids could suddenly become
> murderous on occasion, on signals I didn’t recognize).
>
> I do hear a metaphor doing work (the Devil’s work): imposing human
> intentionality metaphorically on natural phenomena. I can imagine I were
> faced with a world-hoard of such people, that they were incorrigible, and
> that there were no alternatives to be sought out among them. It probably
> would make no sense to even hope to transition them into a kind of person
> that is not hard to find today: somebody like me, who can also hear all the
> same talk within informal categories, but hears in it only the most
> familiar and discouraging human narcissism. If that transition were off
> the table, what options would be left to me?
>
> I guess I would admit defeat, try to limit my losses, and resort to
> metaphors that (as a modern) I find cognitively bad-faith, because maybe I
> would consider that gambit better than accomplishing nothing at all. I
> might say “Yeah yeah yeah, intention, breeders, design, etc., since I know
> you won’t be capable of hearing _anything_ I say in any other terms than
> those. But could you at least bring yourselves to see natural
> circumstances as the designer? Just allow nature a little thin bedsheet or
> veil, to interpose between the intentionality and the empirical events that
> make up sorting and retention/elimination?”
>
> Maybe if I were myself one of these God-suffused people, doing empirical
> work and trying to find my way to some argument that was less empirically
> vacant than what we had all inherited, my path to the metaphors would be
> even more coerced into one channel, and maybe I wouldn’t parse it as one of
> the varieties of defeat.
>
> Then I would probably volunteer a rhetoric closer to Nick’s, in which “we
> know what they/we-all are; now we’re just negotiating the price”.
>
> For me as I actually am, fighting off the religious (and specifically
> Christian; my old Japanese friends tell me there was never the same
> resistance when Darwin was brought to the Buddhists) narcissism is the
> least-interesting thing Darwin did, even though I understand it was
> probably the most socially consequential in its European context. Other
> things, most notably introducing a non-Philoponian notion of causation, are
> much more conceptually interesting, and very very modern, in the cognitive
> problem they solve, and the world for which they pave a way. Since
> superstition had already been mostly expunged from colliding billiard balls
> and the like, I (again, in my modern and incorrigible Weltanschauung) am
> unable to see its persistence w.r.t. all biological phenomena as anything
> but a human motivational pathology, which pre-empts cognitive questions
> from even entering consideration.
>
> EricS
>
> On Mar 27, 2026, at 14:30, Eric Charles <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Tracking what EricS says re the "natural selection" metaphor... here is an
> excerpt from the incipient book....
>
> Natural Selection – The Thing That Explains Evolution
> Darwin explains evolution as a result of Natural Selection, which invokes
> the model of Artificial Selection, or as it was more simply called in
> Darwin’s day *Selection*. It is important to note the language of
> Darwin’s day, because it reminds us that Selection―the intentional breeding
> of organisms to produce descendants with desired traits―was a process that
> most people in Darwin’s time were quite familiar with.
> You will recall that that a model is a situation we think we understand
> well, which is invoked to explain unseen aspects of a situation we think we
> understand less well. In Darwin’s day, there was much confusion over why
> organisms should be adapted to their natural environments, but there was
> little confusion about the process of selection and its effectiveness. This
> creates awkwardness when we try to teach about evolution today, because,
> when most of our students enter class, they know very little about how
> breeding programs work. We start with students who understand neither how
> breeders intentionally control the variation in generations of their stock,
> nor how organisms become adapted to their environments, and we try to make
> them familiar enough with the former to use it as a model in explaining the
> latter. This leads to two possible problems: First, we may fail to get our
> students familiar enough with the model itself. Second, even if we could be
> certain that the students understood artificial selection sufficiently,
> that would not guarantee that they understood Darwin’s application of the
> model.
> ...... [dairy cow example] .....
> We use the example of dairy cattle to illustrate the selection model, but
> what model did Darwin have in mind? Darwin was an avid pigeon breeder, and
> pigeon-breeding was probably the model he had in mind when he came up with
> the idea of natural selection. Alas, the cows make a better model for the
> modern reader, who will find it quite intuitive why one might want a dairy
> cow that produces more milk, but will likely find it mysterious why one
> would favor, for example, a skinny pigeon whose throat inflates into a
> globe large enough for the pigeon's beak to rest upon. (We authors find it
> mysterious as well, though the aesthetic is oddly pleasing.)
> <image.jpeg>[i]
>
>
> ------------------------------
> [i] By Karl Wagner (1864–1939) Public Domain,
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30811756
>
>
> Best,
> Eric
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2026 at 7:34 AM Santafe <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> This is a great note, in the sense of being helpful from endless going
>> around in circles, and written to get somewhere. I am always grateful when
>> EricC visits from the Oort cloud and enables a conversation to go into some
>> direction again.
>>
>> I want, though (of course) to object to something. And a paragraph below
>> enables me to see the way I want to do it. EC already understands the
>> source of the objection, and I will include the final paragraph where it is
>> flagged, though I want to beware oversimplifying to the point of having
>> strawmen (which I don’t think is being done here). But first; the
>> objection:
>>
>>
>> On Mar 26, 2026, at 16:25, Eric Charles <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> There are at least three interesting things going on in the
>> metaphor discussion. The least interesting aspect of it is squabbling over
>> what does or does not count as a metaphor (vice simile, model, analogy,
>> etc.). Not that that isn't a perfectly good discussion, it just that it's
>> *just* a vocabulary discussion, not an ideas discussion.
>>
>> 1) What is an explicit metaphor, and to what extent do the constant
>> implicit metaphors that permeate our language resemble them? Nick has a
>> particular way of thinking about metaphors, based on the intent of the
>> person invoking the metaphor. Metaphors always assert that two things are
>> alike, not that they are identical, so that implies that all metaphors are
>> imperfect, and that that is intentional, and does not invalidate a
>> metaphor. Metaphors can thus be divided into intended implications and
>> not-intended implication, etc., etc. .... and Nick is fairly obsessed with
>> these, especially in scientific contexts where people seem to be using the
>> metaphors in different ways and that leads to a deep underlying confusion
>> in a seemingly functional field, e.g., Darwinian evolution by means of
>> "natural" selection....
>>
>>
>> This is the poster child for a thing that to me is the ultimate
>> non-issue, and has been shown to be the non-issue it is for many decades
>> now.
>>
>> Look up George Price:
>> sciencedirect.com
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.sciencedirect.com%2fscience%2farticle%2fabs%2fpii%2fS002251938570149X&c=E,1,W3dKl-ox5a6gYgmXV1mvxgdASoR140cWFzt9NvHUFiKFUn3joEJlLvSL7fLzEf5YBj-Xe9O6-xf4hKOulX9pl-bzOXzmfveGe3MErMWbrAE,&typo=1>
>>
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.sciencedirect.com%2fscience%2farticle%2fabs%2fpii%2fS002251938570149X&c=E,1,o_3R8DA08GbsWi615mxmIrmkg5AJSlZWAwzi7ZbVo0e9fahJVwHBzARBroebtxSPRzo4mFI6SOUyzEg80w0zj0k78_jqZSE7BK4DxxduhT-Oyrl_GrlnuOrZrg,,&typo=1>
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.sciencedirect.com%2fscience%2farticle%2fabs%2fpii%2fS002251938570149X&c=E,1,LiZkhWK0CnAKHiDnM8ymHlEYM9eaTmBl-Pm46o4LHF9tT1qCALbW2wD1gd9kTQ61lztSwx6mqH6Jl2cIwQYTc9L5TnqyLMY214d0jcgNVGhXh1n9RhA,&typo=1>
>> https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/selection/natural/1995-price.pdf
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fgwern.net%2fdoc%2fgenetics%2fselection%2fnatural%2f1995-price.pdf&c=E,1,MGdnlNH-SlLkbCSWxv_RPzA-cDzDWUzan1XBhSedHDlNR_NiwPVoi_SuhK4dVIj-OttHnDT-h97CWbeg1wlpNVc782NjcStazE-k6Y-99SY_cw,,&typo=1>
>>
>> Price lays out, to a perfectly acceptable degree, an operational
>> description. Of sets of things, of partitioning, of some’s being retained
>> and others’ being eliminated, from the ongoing history of sets that are the
>> targets of description. It’s a phenomenon that takes place in nature, in
>> all sorts of forms. We need some lexeme to refer to it. What is a good
>> one? Selection seems about as apt as anything in English. Quite beside
>> the fact that Darwin wrote about animal breeding, this will still be
>> perhaps the most apt word I have available. Not merely “sorting”, because
>> I need also the consequence of the sort that a retention/elimination step
>> ensues. Human intentionality is not imputed to the phenomenon itself at
>> all, though there can be a subset of cases where it enters as part of the
>> chain of causation.
>>
>> When anybody resurrects this zombie of claiming that some terrible
>> metaphor of human breeding-selection is indelible in the cognition of
>> people thinking about evolution that leads them into confusion, my
>> experience of the conversation is much like the experiences I have had with
>> the Implicit Bias crowd. It doesn’t take much time around many of them,
>> before I am pretty firmly convinced that what they want is to condemn
>> basically everybody (but, one by one, whomever they are talking to). (The
>> nicest image that comes to mind is Aunt Ada’s “I saw something nasty in the
>> woodshed” from Cold Comfort Farm, with about as much content.) The
>> motivation is the whole, and any conversation will take whatever sophistic
>> form gives the performance of fulfilling the motivation. To be clear about
>> what really is going on, and to think well about it and improve the way we
>> handle such problems in living, is incidental to why they do what they do.
>> A kind of trojan horse of a kind we so often see: the existence of a
>> legitimate justice aim becomes a vehicle for people who want to play
>> domination games and to bully. They don’t erase the legitimate justice
>> aim, but by having little serious interest in it (or a secondary and
>> self-serving one, at best), they move it out of scope for any interaction
>> you can have with them. At which point I don’t feel like feeding the
>> trolls. Talk to me about really understanding and really helping, and stop
>> the performing and pretending, or leave me alone.
>>
>> I do think one has to have some interest in knowing what people are
>> doing, in context of the commitment to get thoughts clear and to solve some
>> problems for which the solution has criteria, to keep such intuitions from
>> turning into strawmen.
>>
>>
>> The paragraph I promised to acknowledge, which I think also sees all
>> this, was this one:
>>
>> I suspect that much of the frustration of Nick v others on this list is
>> the instance of those others that any implications of the flavor text can
>> be ignored once the mechanism has been mathematized, vs Nick's instance
>> that if the flavor text is still being used it is almost certainly doing
>> some metaphor-like work in the background of whoever is using, or hearing,
>> the term (because otherwise, why not ditch it entirely).
>>
>>
>> Eric(S)
>>
>>
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