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Which is to say, maladaptive. Despite all the people wishing evolution worked at the group level, it doesn't. Groups don't have offspring, individuals do, and
by MarkusQ 1y ago
Which is to say, maladaptive. Despite all the people wishing evolution worked at the group level, it doesn't. Groups don't have offspring, individuals do, and thus things that are bad for the individual are extinguished regardless of their effect on the group.
If you look closely enough, even individuals aren't the true units of evolution, for the same reason; competing alleles is where the real action is.
- energy123 1y agoAlleles are shared with kin which gives rise to multilevel selection effects in rare but real scenarios.
- saltcured 1y agoWhen thinking about evolutionary forces, you cannot conflate "positive" outcome with survival and reproduction. An individual might survive and produce offspring via effects that make the individual unhappy in their own life and/or with shortened life. It's only when an effect causes death or infertility prior to normal reproductive phases that we can really say it has a direct evolutionary pressure. Anything that happens later is always going to be through secondary, social effects on how their condition supports or hinders their offspring from reproducing further generations.
- MarkusQ 1y agoVoting me down doesn't change the fact that group selection is a myth. A myth that some people are fervently attached to, but a myth nonetheless. Groups simply don't reproduce at a rate or fidelity to allow evolution at the group level over the time scales in question. E pur si muove.