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somervta comments on Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: Adele_L 21 October 2013 03:11AM

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Comment author: somervta 29 October 2013 06:57:25AM 0 points [-]

Inclusive reproductive fitness.

Comment author: cousin_it 29 October 2013 08:45:00AM *  1 point [-]

Do you mean to say that the expected inclusive fitness of a randomly selected creature from the population goes up with time? Well, if we sum that up over the whole population, we obtain the total number of offspring - right? And dividing that by the current population, we see that the expected inclusive fitness of a randomly selected creature is simply the population's growth rate. The problem is that evolution does not always lead to >1 population growth rate. Eliezer gave a nice example of that: "It's quite possible to have a new wolf that expends 10% more energy per day to be 20% better at hunting, and in this case the sustainable wolf population will decrease as new wolves replace old."