[PDF] The Propensity Interpretation of Fitness | Semantic Scholar

It is argued that comparative fitness must be relativized to an evolutionary effect; thus, fitness can be given a unitary mathematical characterization in terms of probabilities of producing offspring and other effects.

This paper looks at two recent challenges to the emerging "received view" of this theory of natural selection and argues that different views of the nature of scientific explanation are playing a pivotal role in the debates.

The thesis of this article is that scientific explanation is perfectly possible in the irregular subjects even when prediction is precluded, and that the impossibility of a Newtonian revolution in the social sciences is not fatal to their status as sciences.

This paper is an attempt to show that this and other existing hypotheses when taken singly are inadequate in some respect to account for all the data, that each holds for some particular set of con- ditions, and that each is but a part of the complete explanation.

This paper refutes assertions that evolutionary theory is unfalsifiable by detailing some falsifiable predictions of the theory and the evidence used to test them and analyzes both what type of predictions are possible and why it has been so difficult to spot them.

The purpose of this paper is to call to the attention of population and evolutionary geneticists that most constant fitness models do not hold true in estimating fitness values in a set proportion of genotypes and in predicting population behavior with respect to the future genetic structure of a given population.

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This volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, as well as many branches of the biological sciences, to consider issues including the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today.

An investigation into the problem of the relative importance of selection and drift in determining the distribution of different colour and banding patterns in C. nemoralis finds that they have definite selective values, related to the environment, determining the general aspect of different populations and therefore of their gene ratios.