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Liron comments on Call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows, on a rolling basis - Less Wrong
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That's a group selection argument.
GAME OVER
Is it necessarily? Consider a population dominated by individuals with an allele for thinking in a uniform fashion. Then insert individuals who will come up with original ideas. A lot of the original ideas are going to be false, but some of them might hit the right spot and confer an advantage. It's a risky, high variance strategy - the bearers of the originality alleles might not end up as the majority, but might not be selected out of the population either.
Sure, you can resurrect it as a high-variance high-expected-value individual strategy with polymorphism maintained by frequency-dependent selection... but then there's still no reason to expect original thinking to be less rational thinking. And the original hypothesis was indeed group selection, so byrnema loses the right to talk about evolutionary psychology for one month or something. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Group_selection
That's me. I don't know anything about evolutionary biology -- I'm not even an amateur. Group selection sounded quite reasonable to me, and now I know that it isn't borne by observation or the math. I can't jump into evolutionary arguments; moratorium accepted.
See:
"As a result many are beginning to recognize that group selection, or more appropriately multilevel selection, is potentially an important force in evolution."
I'm no evo-bio expert, but it seems like you could make it work as something of a kin selection strategy too. If you don't think exactly like your family, then when your family does something collaborative, the odds that one of you has the right idea is higher. Families do often work together on tasks; the more the family that thinks differently succeeds, the better they and their think-about-random-nonconforming-things genes do. Or does assuming that families will often collaborate and postulating mechanisms to make that go well count as a group selection hypothesis?
Anecdotally, it seems to me that across tribes and families, people are less likely to try to occupy a niche that already looks filled. (Which of course would be a matter of individual advantage, not tribal advantage!) Some of the people around me may have failed to enter their area of greatest comparative advantage, because even though they were smarter than average, I looked smarter.
Example anecdote: A close childhood friend who wanted to be a lawyer was told by his parents that he might not be smart enough because "he's not Eliezer Yudkowsky". I heard this, hooted, and told my friend to tell his parents that I said he was plenty smart enough. He became a lawyer.
THAT had a tragic ending!