Text 1223, 41 rader
Skriven 2004-12-29 14:54:00 av Joe Felsenstein (1:278/230)
Ärende: Re: McGinn's disproof of
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In article <cqthls$hpp$1@darwin.ediacara.org>,
EKurtz99 <EKurtz99@TwilightZone.com> wrote:

>You chose HWE as a simple modeling result that the skeptics must reject if 
>they are consistent. But what is true of HWE is also true for Mendel's 
>explanation of phenotypic ratios in what we now call Mendelian traits. 
>Likewise for the explanation of normally distributed quantitative traits, 
>linkage, recombination... If the skeptics had their way, genetics would 
>become merely a collection of observations with no explanatory structure.

I think the issue is not just skepticism but that they think that they are
being terribly Popperian by requiring that models be a precise description
of nature.  That requires them to reject all previous models in biology,
where the models are much rougher than in, say, physics.  The Popperian
framework of making a prediction from the model, then completely tossing out
the model when the prediction is in any way wrong, doesn't work at all in
population biology.  We have imprecise models and statistical evidence,
rather than all-or-none predictions.

We make models that are idealized, define things like fitness that are
meaningful in those models, and then try to refine the models.  But some
of the "skeptics" want definitions of things like fitness that will be able
to work in the real world.  They don't realize that in doing this, they
in effect erect their own not-quite-real models, but without being explicit
about it.  When a "skeptic" says that, by fitness I mean number of offspring
per parent (or whatever), they implicitly simplify the situation by ignoring
overlapping generations, and a bunch of other phenomena.

-- 
Joe Felsenstein         joe@removethispart.gs.washington.edu
 Department of Genome Sciences and Department of Biology,
 University of Washington, Box 357730, Seattle, WA 98195-7730 USA
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