title: Block Fitness.
abstract: There are three related criteria that a concept of fitness should be able to meet: it should render the principle of natural selection non-tautologous and it should be explanatory and predictive. I argue that for fitness to be able to fulfill these criteria, it cannot be a property that changes over the course of an individual's life. Rather, I introduce a fitness concept--Block Fitness--and argue that an individual's genes and environment fix its fitness in such a way that each individual's fitness has a fixed value over its lifetime.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, Duke University, 201 West Duke Building, Box 90743, Durham, NC 27708, USA. grant.ramsey@duke.edu
authors.forename: Grant
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ramsey
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D004777:Environment; D006801:Humans; D008017:Life Expectancy; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010809:Physical Fitness; D012098:Reproduction; D012641:Selection, Genetic; D013997:Time Factors