The connection between my assault on TENS and the development of Veriphysics has become apparent to others:
“Natural selection” by its primary definition is only useful for narrative storytelling, which is the only sort of “explanation” evolutionary biologists are actually comfortable with or capable of. This is the “natural selection” of evo psych and of the vast majority of evolutionary literature. Whenever you hear stories about what such-and-such trait “evolved for” or the “problem” that evolution (spoken of as if it were a causal agent) was “trying” to “solve,” you are seeing an example of natural selection by its primary definition.
The problem is that just as just as “natural selection” by its primary definition is incoherent and doesn’t refer to anything in reality, so these just-so stories about purposes being “selected for” or “solved” don’t actually have any coherent meaning and don’t cash out to anything in concrete physical reality.
“Natural selection” by its secondary definition, meanwhile, refers to something real, but it is only useful for things like statistical analysis of which allele variants were “selected” and estimates of “selection coefficients” and so on, not for giving any sort of explanation for new biological function.
The only relationship between these two definitions of “natural selection” is that Darwinists, starting with Darwin himself, conflate the two by using the same name for them both and by equivocating between them as convenient to evade criticism. If the critic points out that natural selection by its primary definition is incoherent and that its just-so stories don’t cash out to anything in concrete physical reality, the Darwinist will switch to the secondary definition by pointing out that some variants logically have to be more advantageous in a given environment than others and that “selection coefficients” can even be estimated. If the critic points out that natural selection by the second definition is a tautology that can’t in principle explain biological function, the Darwinist will switch to the primary definition by insisting that natural selection is basically like a human designer selecting variants for his intended purpose but with unfathomable amounts of time.
As part of the conflation of these two different concepts, the Darwinist is forced to conflate two different meanings of “beneficial” and “the fittest.” Specifically, the idea of a variant being “beneficial” or “more fit” in the sense of having a reproductive advantage in its immediate environment has to be conflated with it being fit or beneficial for the long-term purposes of “natural selection” imagined as an intelligent agent trying to build future integrated systems with new function, even though these two definitions have no logical relationship to each other.
Now this is where Vox’s Triveritas comes into play. Because Darwinian natural selection is not one concept, but actually two very different concepts conflated together, the different aspects of Darwinism are susceptible to the three legs of the Triad to different degrees.
“Natural selection” by its primary definition is really only susceptible to analysis in terms of its logical validity. Precisely because it is logically invalid, none of its narrative storytelling explanations cash out to anything concrete that can be empirically evaluated or mathematically modeled. At best we can say that it’s susceptible to a very loose sort of empirical disconfirmation, such as that actual human behavior doesn’t follow the expectations of evo psych. But as Darwinists have amply shown, they can always spin a new narrative about “natural selection” to “explain” any outcome or its opposite.
Natural selection by its secondary definition can be logically critiqued for its tautological nature, and the conflation of the two can of course be logically critiqued for being a logical conflation.
However, the Darwinian insistence that the two definitions of “natural selection” are actually one and the same opens up avenues for different degrees of hybrid logical-mathematical and logical-empirical critiques of “natural selection” by its primary definition.
Because “natural selection” by its primary definition is meant to account for biological function, if some aspects of biological function can be mathematically quantified or modeled, and if “natural selection” by its secondary definition can be shown to be mathematically incapable of reaching it, then natural selection by both definitions is thereby shown to be incapable of explaining what it is meant to by a combination of logic and math.
It’s retrospectively obvious, I suppose, but it is a little ironic that I didn’t see it in the larger context earlier, even though I specifically turned the Triveritas on natural selection proper, rather than the larger argument around the polythesis. And it wasn’t until William Dembski brought my attention toward ID that I finally understood the relationship between what I’d hitherto regarded as having no more connection than either do to the SSH.
Although I suppose even that comes into play thanks to Michael Sartain and other evopsych enthusiasts.