5 ms·

Evolution focuses on populations, not individuals. A lot of things make more sense if you consider that.

• marton78 7y ago
  On the contrary. Evolution focuses on individuals.
  • iguy 7y ago
    Or lower, on selfish genes™️. Which can certainly imply doing things bad for the individual but good for their kin group. Although I don't know about this Inuit story.
    • hprotagonist 7y ago
      “selfish gene” is my very least favorite anthropomorphism.
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    Darwin himself argued for group selection. He postulated that moral men might not do any better than immoral men but that tribes of moral men would certainly “have an immense advantage” over fractious bands of pirates." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-the-group/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-th... Though the pendulum swings. The case isn't clear-cut, and the argument for group-level selection (or even symbiotic or more general multi-species co-evolution) is strong.
    • im3w1l 7y ago
      Group level selection is irrefutably a thing (Multicellular organisms are selected as a group. Eusocial insects are too). The only question is how important it is in various contexts, in some it may be negligible.
      • Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        In humans, even individual selection is pretty negligible as an effect. We breed too slowly, we're too homogeneous, there aren't enough of us, and we don't face anywhere near the kind of selective pressure most species do.
        • toasterlovin 7y ago
          We absolutely face the same degree of selective pressure that other species do. You can clearly see that some people leave many descendants, whereas others leave none. The selective pressure we face is different though. Other species may be selected primarily on ability to extract food from the environment while surviving predation and disease, whereas we are being selected on our desire to have children.
          • Jweb_Guru 7y ago
            The fact that some people leave many descendants while others do not does not necessarily imply the existence of strong selective pressure, particularly selective pressure for genetically heritable traits. For example, it could be mostly random, resulting in genetic drift that has essentially nothing to do with external environmental factors. By most definitions genetic drift is not natural selection, because it doesn't select for any particular attributes in the species, outside of preserving basic functional requirements (e.g. members of the species must be able to reproduce at a reasonable rate). "Desire to have children" is a good example of something that does not obviously select for any particular genes. Many people who don't have children (or have only one) simply don't feel they can afford it, or (e.g. in China until recently) live somewhere where having extra children is a liability; while money is indeed heritable, selection against the poor or legally disadvantaged is not natural selection. Similarly, selecting for people who believe in a particular religion that encourages reproduction, etc. These things are not correlated with genetic markers to begin with so this "selective" process will just lead to more drift, or (if the population shrinks sufficiently) result in bottleneck events that lead to even more genetic homogeneity without selecting for any useful traits. I'm not saying sexual selection isn't a thing, incidentally--but I am saying that there's very little evidence that sexual selection is the primary driver of whether humans reproduce. This is qualitatively different from "real" natural selection, which requires a combination of any or all of: significant external stressors, significant untapped resources, a lot of generations, and a high population or mutation rate. We can see that humans are not under especially significant selective pressure when we consider that despite huge death tolls and a very strong negative effect on ability to reproduce, it will take a very long time (IIRC, on the order of 1000 years) before a large majority of people in any area of the world are naturally resistant to HIV.
  • Iv 7y ago
    Just look at that precise case: a practice that was detrimental to some male genes helped save a population. The people with a practice that favored individual genes went extinct.
• toasterlovin 7y ago
  Evolution focuses on genes, not individuals or populations.