Fitness: Hueristic or Fundamental to Biology?

I understand your reticence against the individualized experience of taught evolutionary thought especially if one reads the discussion following Russell having said (in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism(p241 of “Logic and Knowledge”)) “I am sorry that I have had to leave so many problems unsolved. I always have to make this apology, but the world really is rather puzzling and I can not help it.”

quote:

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Discussion
Question Is there any word you would substitute for ”existence’ which would give existence to individuals? Are you applying the word ”existence’ to two ideas, or do you deny that there are two ideas?
Mr. Russell No, there is not an idea that will apply to individuals. As regards the actual things there are in the world, there is nothing at all you can say about them that in any way corresponds to this notion of existence. It is sheer mistake to say that there is anything analogous to existence that you can say about them. You get into confusion through language, because it is a perfectly correct thing to say ”All the things in the world exist’, and it is so easy to pass from this to ”This exists because it is a thing in the world’. There is no sort of point in a predicate which could not conceivably be false. I mean, it is perfectly clear that, if there were such a thing as this existence of individuals that we talk of, it would be absolutely impossible for it not to apply, and that is the characteristic of a mistake.

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Now fitness of any stripe depends on SURVIVAL of a form IN space not existence as in a mathematical proof. Russell will go on to discuss how his use of words and response to the question of ideation may depend on individuals in a possible sense of Darwin, but Darwin is not the ”man’ that Russell writes of when he notes that Boole accomplished with logic something Leibniz was always trying to do and seems to be what would become of the name “Hoot Mon” if he ”got’ it and became an EVCappellation ”Hoot Man’ rather than a blinking avatar. Thursday is not Wednesday. I have noted how this mis-”take’ on “existence” even exists (different colours red by me)for biologists who DO try not to make it. Latent variables in hypotheses are to blame.See this page:
http://axiompanbiog.com/panbioglnks.aspx
(scroll to bottom)
The sentence scheme following Russell would be something not, a simple proposition but on, of, a propositional function such that “All things evolutionary in the world exist” & “This biological change exists because it is a changed thingy in our world”. Thus via Russell’s ideology evolutionary individuals and the genes the thingy connotes exist only because the Darwinian algorithm, whether inclusive or not, exists. Copy cat digital algorithms on computer screens do not subsist via the “and” necessarily.

I'm not misrepresenting your position here Quetzal, I misunderstood it and asked for clarification. Hence why I said 'I'm sure I'm missing something here'. I see. It seems our differences lie in the question in the OP. If fitness is tied directly to natural selection, then in my view fitness has to be of a gene. We can talk of the fitness of an individual, but that wouldn't so directly tied with natural selection - it would just be a 'fuzzy' guide. Naturally, if you define fitness as something only an individual possesses - then genecentrism makes no comment - why would it? Genecentrism isn't 'the gene is the only interesting thing to biology', its just an argument about where evolutionary selection occurs.