I know the above statement might have unfortunate implications in the wrong context, but I would like to see it proven wrong instead of just dismissed, if you think you disagree with it.
You treat the the theory group selection as fact when a lot of established biologists don't think that group selection has strong effects.
Furthermore people who speak against group selection like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins have a higher esteem in this community than people speaking in favor of group selection.
I have a vague memory of e-mailing Dawkins a decade or so ago about group selection and getting a response which more or less summed it up to my satisfaction: There's evolution of evolvability (or something like that, he had an interesting phrase for it), which is to say, group selection can take place based on individual-level selection pressures. The example, IIRC, was the tendency for certain kinds of species to grow larger with longer reproductive cycles, then go extinct as their reproductive cycles extended out to the point where they couldn't evolve...
This sort of thinking seems bad:
This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:
Similar points could be made by replacing a/b with [group of people]. I think it's terrible to say something like:
But to me, it doesn't seem wrong to say something like:
Credit and accountability seem like good things to me, and so I want to live in a world where people/groups receive credit for good qualities, and are held accountable for bad qualities.
I'm not sure though. I could see that there are unintended consequences of such a world. For example, such "score keeping" could lead to contentiousness. And perhaps it's just something that we as a society (to generalize) can't handle, and thus shouldn't keep score.