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I came here to say essentially this. But what is the name of this process where groups of people select for variety instead of optimal individuals?
by edejong 5y ago
I came here to say essentially this. But what is the name of this process where groups of people select for variety instead of optimal individuals?
- roenxi 5y agoI'm confident that it is evolution. People don't evolve, populations evolve.
- dTal 5y agoYou're confident, but evolutionary biologists largely don't agree with you. I strongly recommend you glance over some of the reasons why at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection In a nutshell - "The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution... a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse."
- dTal 5y agoIt's a type of natural selection called "group selection", and it's taboo, because it's very tempting to invoke it to explain away all sort of apparent paradoxes - but it requires very tricky circumstances to work at all, if it even can, and it's rare for the explain-away-ers to bother to show why it works in their particular instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection