'Fitness' in 'Survival of Fittest': explained in Evolutionary Computation framework

摘要

Leave alone the majop controversies of Darwinian theory, one of the most misunderstood term in evolutionary biology is 'fitness', where misunderstanding ranges in a wide spectrum from philosophical arguments to basic classroom definitions. These misunderstandings started cropping up only when fitness was being quantified, considering that evolution by natural selection was dominated by opportunity and chance. We discuss these misconceptions in a framework of evolutionary computation called 'A Conceptual Evolutionary model' (ACE-model) which can be considered as an optimization model for evolution. We stress the need to introduce abstract concepts like 'fitness landscape' in the evolutionary theories. We give explicit definitions of genotype fitness and phenotype fitness. And we claim that what is being optimized in the evolutionary process is actually genotype fitness(which is defined as corresponding value of genotype in fitness landscape), not the measured phenotype fitness.