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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

As I was reading this I noticed that Erik makes the same logical mistake that is often made when people contemplate evolutionary theory... the notion that natural selection happens to the group rather than to the individual.

It came as a sort of entertaining surprise, then, to read a bit further and notice that Erik explicitly attempts a metaphor about group selection to underscore his comments about how a human social system ought to work.

To those who haven't read the book in question: I recommend reading it for yourself before you waste much time reading essays like Erik's.

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Since groups also self-perpetuate, why wouldn't selectionist pressures apply to both individuals and groups?

selection doesn't even apply directly to the individual, but to the survival of individual genes through individuals.

if a gene establishes itself within the genepool of a group, that is because it has been beneficial to every individual (and the genes that survive through that individual), by it's own merit - not by merit of being widespread in the group already, along the way.

Well, a gene can spread in a small group through drift (even if detrimental). If it allows that group to out-compete the next tribe over, it will spread farther.

Of course, no one has ever seen this in action, so it's pretty unlikely that group selection is very important in evolutionary history.

Not true. A group does not "out compete" another group. Individuals only survive and reproduce or don't survive or don't reproduce.

That doesn't really matter for my point, which was that group selection is a very wrongheaded way to look at the issue. Abstracting an organism's genotype and phenotype as "an individual" is accurate shorthand, while group selection just doesn't happen.

Some form of "Group Selection" works, with stuff like the Green Beard Effect. There can be subgroups where sexual attraction is influenced by something like that. If group selection can work with a pair of traits in two halves of a population, it seems like it could work for a single trait in both halves of a population.

If you treat "race" as a word meaning "extended families that reproduce to some extent," then you have a great evolutionary argument for in-group altruism. By being slightly sensitive to race, you allocate slightly more resources to your own set of genes, meaning that people who share your genes, in turn, have more resources they can allocate back to you. In conditions of scarcity, that really helps. However, I don't know if it helps enough to deal with defectors (i.e. if there's a group that allocates lots of resources to group members, someone born with a "mooching" gene could afford lots of kids. It is basically the same math that wrecks cartels, just on a longer timeline).

You are making a narrow statement about human social groups and extrapolating backwards to the much more general case of evolution in all species.

To those who haven't read the book in question: I recommend never reading it.

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