Re: cells defecting by becoming gametes, I think you were maybe a bit too terse. I believe I’ve figured out what’s going on, but let me run it by you:
*Within the organism*, there’s no selection pressure for cells to become gametes—mutations are random variations, not strategic actors, so a leaf is no more likely to ‘decide’ to become a flower than the reverse (which would also be harmful overall). The organism *does* have an incentive to keep the random mutation rate down, but no reason to *specifically* combat cells ‘defecting’ in this way.
And actually, if flowers are especially costly, the organism might evolve specific “no accidental flowers” adaptations—but for reasons unrelated to coordination problems.
Meanwhile, on a species level, there might be a bias in favor of the flower-instead-of-leaf mutations appearing in the gene pool, since these can show up via gamete mutations or leaf mutations, whereas most mutations can only appear via gamete mutations. Intuitively this seems unlikely to be a big deal, but I do wonder if tweaking the parameters could make it significant enough to make a specific adaptation to fight it worthwhile.
Re: cells defecting by becoming gametes, I think you were maybe a bit too terse. I believe I’ve figured out what’s going on, but let me run it by you:
*Within the organism*, there’s no selection pressure for cells to become gametes—mutations are random variations, not strategic actors, so a leaf is no more likely to ‘decide’ to become a flower than the reverse (which would also be harmful overall). The organism *does* have an incentive to keep the random mutation rate down, but no reason to *specifically* combat cells ‘defecting’ in this way.
And actually, if flowers are especially costly, the organism might evolve specific “no accidental flowers” adaptations—but for reasons unrelated to coordination problems.
Meanwhile, on a species level, there might be a bias in favor of the flower-instead-of-leaf mutations appearing in the gene pool, since these can show up via gamete mutations or leaf mutations, whereas most mutations can only appear via gamete mutations. Intuitively this seems unlikely to be a big deal, but I do wonder if tweaking the parameters could make it significant enough to make a specific adaptation to fight it worthwhile.