manuelg comments on The Tragedy of Group Selectionism - Less Wrong
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Eliezer -
Would "innovation" in genetic error correction, or changes to the proteins responsible for allowing greater or fewer mutations in DNA...
...would such "meta-changes" (changes to the mechanisms of DNA replication) be the basis for group selection?
If different groups had slightly different rules for their DNA replication, intuitively I could see that their competition would be best understood as group selection.
Consider two groups, both formed by mating of a single mother pregnant with a son, leading to two groups with slightly different rules for their DNA replication.
We might expect to see this if some population was regularly exposed to absolutely devastating conditions, where the often a population would have to recover from a single individual, a mother pregnant with a son.
If not this, how did "innovations" to DNA error correction and selection for the different rules about how many mutations to allow in DNA copying even form in the first place?