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timtyler comments on Walkthrough of the Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI paper - Less Wrong
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Even to the extent that natural selection can be said to be care about anything, saying that survival is that thing is kind of misleading. It's perfectly normal for populations to hill-climb themselves into a local optimum and then get wiped out when it's invalidated by changing environmental conditions that a more basal but less specialized species would have been able to handle, for example.
(Pandas are a good example, or would be if we didn't think they were cute.)
Well, I have gone into more details elsewhere.
Sure. Optimization involves going uphill - but you might be climbing a mountain that is sinking into the sea. However, that doesn't mean that you weren't really optimizing - or that you were optimizing something other than altitude.
The question's more about what function's generating the fitness landscape you're looking at (using "fitness" now in the sense of "fitness function"). "Survival" isn't a bad way to characterize that fitness function -- more than adequate for eighth-grade science, for example. But it's a short-tern and highly specialized kind of survival, and generalizing from the word's intuitive meaning can really get you into trouble when you start thinking about, for example, death.
Evolution is only as short-sighted as the creatures that compose its populations. If organisms can do better by predicting the future (and sometimes they can) then the whole process is a foresightful one. Evolution is often characterised as 'blind to the future' - but that's just a mistake.
If you're dealing with creatures good enough at modeling the world to predict the future and transfer skills, then you're dealing with memetic factors as well as genetic. That's rather beyond the scope of natural selection as typically defined.
Granted, I suppose there are theoretical situations where that argument wouldn't apply -- but I'm having trouble imagining an animal smart enough to make decisions based on projected consequences more than one selection round out, but too dumb to talk about it. We ourselves aren't nearly that smart individually.
What?!? Natural selection applies to both genes and memes.
I don't think you presented a supporting argument. You referenced "typical" definitions of natural selection. I don't know of any definitions that exclude culture. Here's a classic one from 1970 - which explicitly includes cultural variation. Even Darwin recognised this, saying: "The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection."
If anyone tells you that natural selection doesn't apply to cultural variation, they are simply mistaken.
I recommend not pursuing this avenue.