Comment by ericwaller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericwaller | Hacker News Reader

It's not possible (by definition) to "short-circuit" or undermine evolution. Modern medicine is our species acting within the process of evolution. Just as we consider early humans to have "evolved" the ability to use crude tools, we have "evolved" the ability to use penicillin, brain surgery, etc.

"Survival of the fittest" is a useless tautology. An organism's evolutionary fitness, if there were such a thing, would be its ability to survive to reproductive age. So of course the fittest survive, we've defined fitness to mean survival.

In reality it's the species that has an evolutionary fitness; and the distinction is important. Take a bee colony for example, a huge number of the bees are infertile.

To address your example: infertility treatments may catalyze an evolutionary process of selecting against those who are disinterested in child rearing. Or, like the bee colony, infertility in some members of the species may be evolutionarily advantageous; hard to imagine, but not without precedent.

"fitness" in a Darwinian context has the sense of what a hand does to a glove, rather than physical prowess. Those organisms that survive "fit" their environment better.

"In reality it's the species that has an evolutionary fitness".

Sorry but no. Read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. Selection does NOT act on the level of a bee colony, it acts on the level of the individual genes to be found within that colony. So sure some bees are infertile, but they are in service of the genes of the fertile bees. They are in effect enslaved by the genes of the Queen bee for instance.

Some types of ants will raid the colonies of other ants, and kidnap their children, bring them back, and the kidnapped children were grow up in service/servitude to the colony which had kidnapped them, and join in on future raids of what was once their home nest. The kidnapped ants are in service to their captors, to the genes of their captors. Say for instance the kidnapped ants were black, and their captors were red(or the other way around), so, even though the kidnapped ants do not have the "red" gene, they are helping to promote the selective advantage of the "red" gene by joining in the hunt for the colony of their captors. It is not a matter of "colony a" being selected for over and above "colony b". It is rather the genes of either colony getting selected for over other genes. All life, from viral to the naked apes like us, are subject to "the tyranny of the selfish gene".

Strictly, the evolutionary fitness of an individual is the ratio of that individual's genes to all of the genes in the subsequent generation.

What Dawkins is likely saying (I haven't read the book), is that we can (or even should) forget about individuals and just look at relative gene frequencies (b/w generations); we'll see that some are selected for and some are selected against. And that this is actually the level at which evolution occurs.

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