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Perplexed comments on Group selection update - Less Wrong
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Comments (58)
I hope I am not doing that thing you call dangerous. But it is not quite true that careless labeling is harmless to a rationalist. Recall that this entire discussion took off when Phil cited a paper dealing with sex (selfing). He called it a paper about group selection whereas I preferred to call it a paper about species selection. What difference does it make how you label it? Well, please recall the reason Phil cited the paper. He called it the best evidence yet that group selection works. And he did so in response to EY's anti-group-selection interjection where the focal example had nothing at all to do with sex or speciation.
So is the paper Phil cited evidence against EY? I suppose it depends upon whether Phil's paper is about group selection or not.
The focal example was foxes (a species) adapting to control their eating of rabbits to avoid exterminating them. That's species selection.
His key objection is mathematical: "Specifically, the requirement is [C < FB] where C is the cost of altruism to the donor, B is the benefit of altruism to the recipient, and F is the spatial structure of the population: the average relatedness between a randomly selected organism and its randomly selected neighbor." This applies equally to clades, species, and smaller groups. So if it's a knockdown argument against small-group selection, it's also a knockdown argument against species selection, which exists.
And, as I pointed out in my post, the problem with that analysis is that it assumes that there is no selection of groups. It's arguing against a strawman "group selection" theory that has no selection. The argument thus both fails analytically, and is disproven by an example that it applies to.
You must be thinking of a different EY interjection than I was when I wrote that. I meant this EY comment:
which responded to this comment of yours:
No foxes, no sex, and no species selection in what I was talking about. Edit: Inflamatory and non-responsive comment deleted.