Technical Comment on "up", Dawkins, Darwinians

Dawkins and other myopic Darwinians are operating under the assumption that the fitness metric evolution utilizes is a scalar field in a flat metric.

in terms of General Relativity or Hilbert space, "up" is only well-defined in a flat metric with zero curvature. Once you let the metric be curved, or even multiply connected, the best you can do (!) is to define a local "more fit" direction, and even that may vary among observers with different velocities or observational positions or scales of observation.

Attempting to reduce multiple dimensions to a single dimension is a "Procrustean" activity, invalid - but done all the time as we attempt to find the "best" spouse, or house, or investment, or sports team, or job, or employee, or political candidate.

We have to stop trying to force the world to come down to the level of our tools. We need to start trying to improve our tools up to the level of the world around us.

Then, we'll be able to see what's going on much better. Scientific tools are a great idea, and we need more and better tools, but in the meantime the conclusions drawn from them should be no stronger than the demonstrated validity and calibration of those tools on the type of problem in question.

I suggest recomputing the behavior of evolution if the fitness metric space is a generalized Hilbert space, even simply connected, but at a higher rank than a scalar field.  For example, suppose "fitness" is defined as a 5-dimensional field,  corresponding to sublocal fitness at two levels, local fitness, group-fitness, and supergroup fitness.  Then, what kind of pathways are there through that space over a billion years?

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