Maybe it doesn't help when you're the only one, but that doesn't matter; your species is one that has multiple children, and the mutation was so small it occurred in multiple children? ... And if that's too high a complexity penalty, there could be an alternative: say it is a trait which got spread due to a resource boom in a population (the resource boom makes it likely for even disadvantaged mutations to survive), and then individuals with the trait managed to find each other and be more fit?
... Just conjecture, though.
Doesn't this suffer from a similar problem as group selection?
Imagine that the first mutant gets lucky and has 20 children; 10 of them inherited the "help your siblings" genes, and 10 of them did not. Does this give an advantage to the nice children over the non-nice ones? Well, only in the next generation... but then again, some children in the next generation will have the gene and some will not... and this feels like there is always an immediate disadvantage that is supposed to get balanced by an advantage in the next generation, except that t...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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