Marshall Abrams (Alabama)

While there are difficult philosophical problems concerning quantum mechanics that are relevant to our understanding of the nature of quantum mechanical probabilities, it’s clear that (a) the probabilities seem to be fundamental to quantum mechanics, and (b) the numerical values of probabilities are given by the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics (perhaps via some extension such as GRW). There are also philosophical problems concerning the nature of probabilities that arise in statistical mechanics, but the mathematical theories of statistical mechanics that are relevant to these problems usually constrain the numerical values of these probabilities fairly narrowly. The situation is different in evolutionary biology, where widespread uses of models and frequentist statistical inference in empirical research seem to depend on the fact that evolving populations realize (something like) objective probabilities. (These might be objective imprecise probabilities.) But we have had little guidance about how to think about the fundamental nature of these “evolutionary” probabilities.