timtyler comments on Intelligence Explosion vs. Co-operative Explosion - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 16 April 2012 11:01AM

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Comment author: timtyler 17 April 2012 11:12:36AM *  2 points [-]

The "new" group selection (e.g. here, here and here) has been demonstrated to be pretty-much equivalent to the standard and uncontroversial inclusive fitness framwork in a raft of papers.

Here's Marek Kohn writing in 2008:

There is widespread agreement that group selection and kin selection — the post-1960s orthodoxy that identifies shared interests with shared genes — are formally equivalent.

That's not to say that group selection is useless - since it involves different models and accounting methods.

There are still a few dissenters. E.g. Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson (2010) apparently disagree - saying:

Group selection models, if correctly formulated, can be useful approaches to studying evolution. Moreover, the claim that group selection is kin selection is certainly wrong.

These folk apparently don't grok the topic too well.