MugaSofer comments on The Psychological Unity of Humankind - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 June 2008 07:12AM

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Comment author: MugaSofer 20 March 2016 03:35:32PM 0 points [-]

It's almost like having a third sex. In fact the winged males look far more like females than they look like wingless males.

That sounds like exactly the kind of situation Eliezer claims as the exception - the adaptation is present in the entire population, but only expressed in a subset based on the environmental conditions during development, because there's a specific advantage to polymorphism.

There's the whole phenomenon of frequent-dependent selection. Most people are familiar with this from blood types, and sickle-cell anaemia.

Those are single genes, not complex adaptations consisting of multiple mutually-dependant genes. Exactly the "froth" he describes.