kaimialana comments on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 September 2007 08:05PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (161)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: kaimialana 26 July 2010 10:17:44PM 5 points [-]

Actually, there can be multi-level selection (MLS theory; cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Multilevel_selection_theory) when there is competition between groups. In the same sense there is selection between individuals when there is competition between individuals, or the competition between genes popularized by Richard Dawkins.

http://www.americanscientist.org/my_amsci/restricted.aspx?act=pdf&id=16386020847008http://www.americanscientist.org/my_amsci/restricted.aspx?act=pdf&id=16386020847008 is a good primer.

This is the best solution for Darwin's problem of ant colonies, even better than haplodiploidy. I thought I would come out of lurking while reading through the sequences to mention this, since multi-level selection was demonized during the 70s under the name "group selection" due to some overzealous proponents. So, while we would not say "evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets", we might hypothesize evolution favors human societies that buy lottery tickets when under competition with other societies that do not (as an example).