MAXIMIZING AND BIOLOGY

Metaphors of maximization are used repeatedly in biological discussions of evolution. To test whether the usefulness of a maximizing formulation, such as has been developed in economics and physics, is really borne out of sociobiology, some concrete demographic models have been taken from standard Lotka theory. They have been combined with scarcity of resources and the law of diminishing returns. It then turns out that the resulting coupled non-linear system of difference equations can only sometimes be given a maximizing interpretation. When this can be done, it is shown that no knowledge on the part of the participants or the observers of any preexisting problem to be solved is required. But, even when a maximizing interpretation is possible, it is shown that teleological concepts such as "egotism,""reciprocal altruism,""adaptation," or "fitness" are redundant ways of describing the positivistic fact that Nature's cookie sometimes crumbles in such a way as to make certain patterns recurrent and viable, while certain other patterns are only transiently persistent. Most important of all, for almost every choice of the parameters of a model no maximand can be found to be definable and whose solution constitutes the observable and testable behavior equations. Not only are the imperialist-economists pretensions debunked by this audit, but in addition various of the concepts of biologists such as R. A. Fisher are seen to be severely limited in scope and application.