This week I will finish up with Gardner’s paper (2015 Jour. Ev. Biol doi:10:1111/jeb. 12566) which I have been discussing for the past two weeks. Given the problems with the literature review and the model, it is hardly surprising that this has led to issues with the discussion. I have problems with virtually the entire …
Continue reading “Gardner’s theory of multilevel selection 3: the discussion”
Continuing our discussion of Gardners paper on “the genetical theory of natural selection” (Gardner 2015 Jour. Evol. Biol. doi: 10.1111/jeb.12566) I want to turn from complaining about his failure to read the literature, and this week start talking about the model itself. He starts the model with a discussion of Fishers fundamental theorem, which I …
Continue reading “Gardner’s theory of multilevel selection: Parsing the Model”
Two things have happened recently. First, Jonathan Pruitt and I (Pruitt and Goodnight 2014 Nature 514:359) have been asked to reply to a goodly number of letters to the editor concerning our paper on multilevel selection in Nature. These letters have made it clear to me that many people have a very basic misunderstanding of …
Continue reading “Gardner’s theory of multilevel selection: Where he goes wrong and why”
Lots of people get bent out of shape about Fisher’s Fundamental theorem, and spend lots of pages talking about it. The problem is that people tend to see the FFT as being magical. Theoreticians promote this because, well, the basic proof is so simple that you need to add some sort of complication to justify …
Continue reading “A one line proof of Fishers fundamental theorem”
James Watson has been in the news for more than just his efforts to sell some bullion. He has also been in the news for his completely outrageous racist and sexist comments. Two of the more famous ones are the time he told a reporter that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” …
First off, I did a search for papers that used contextual analysis in some form or another to analyze experimental data. This is the list I came up with. It seems pretty pitiful for a statistical method that (1) works and (2) with the exception of Heisler and Damuth using a very small data set …
The main piece of sad news this week is that I am just simply overwhelmed, and I am going to have to take a hiatus from writing. I will try to post occasionally, but look for once or twice a month rather than weekly. The reason is that I signed a book contract. I need …
Continue reading “Hiatus announcement and group selection 1 and 2.”
So far I have been writing about things that in some sense I fancy I know something about the answer. Today, all I have is conundrum. The conundrum I have is this: one of the unspoken themes of this blog is that the “mean field approximation” is inadequate, and yet I am failing to provide …
I realized last week that I should probably explain more clearly what I meant by temporal components of fitness. As a result, a discussion of variance will have to wait until next week (I actually am flying to California for a National Academies Keck Futures Initiative meeting next week, so the next update may be …
This past week I went over to the university at a nearby city, and talked to some physicists interested in complex systems, and among other things, biology. As seems to be the nature of physicists turned biologists, I was impressed with some of their ideas, but also impressed with their lack of knowledge of biology, …
Continue reading “A conversation with a physicist: Some thoughts on fitness”