(Also I don’t get why this discussion is treating evolution as ‘non-real’: stuff like the Price equation seems pretty formal to me. To me it seems like a pretty mathematisable theory with some hard-to-specify inputs like fitness.)
Yeah, I agree, see my edits to the original comment and also my reply to Ben. Abram’s comment was talking about reproductive fitness the entire time and then suddenly switched to evolution at the end; I didn’t notice this and kept thinking of evolution as reproductive fitness in my head, and then wrote a comment based on that where I used the word evolution despite thinking about reproductive fitness and the general idea of “there is a local hill-climbing search on reproductive fitness” while ignoring the hard math.
Yeah, I agree, see my edits to the original comment and also my reply to Ben. Abram’s comment was talking about reproductive fitness the entire time and then suddenly switched to evolution at the end; I didn’t notice this and kept thinking of evolution as reproductive fitness in my head, and then wrote a comment based on that where I used the word evolution despite thinking about reproductive fitness and the general idea of “there is a local hill-climbing search on reproductive fitness” while ignoring the hard math.