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JoshuaZ comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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This seems to smell a bit too much of group selection. Remember, extremely large selection pressures are needed for group selection to work.
No group selection is necessary if the animals in question are a herd of livestock. The same effect would apply to wild animals only because our reflexes can't distinguish the two cases.
Destroying a population of livestock is a group problem that gives its negative selection on the local tribe. For wild animals this is even worse since the selection pressure is then spread over at least all humans in the region and probably over other species that would be using those wild species as prey. Worse, there's a clear individual negative to not eating a young wild animal when one has a chance; it is easy food that won't fight back.
Not in societies that have a notion of property ownership, and not for herders that travel alone or with a group composed only of genetic relatives. That there would be group selection too does not matter much.
Granted. But in order for that to matter one would need that to be the primary form of herding for a very large amount of human history.