In studying evolutionary biology, “group-selection” has a specific meaning, an individual sacrifices its own fitness in order to improve the group fitness.
I think it’s quite limiting to think strictly in terms of genetics, because there is more than one level of description going on when it comes to selection pressure.
It is interesting to take that step back and view the culture as an individual. The human super-organism (e.g., a tribe, or more generally, a culture) competes with others for resources. It consumes, metabolizes, and excretes, which is to say that it lowers entropy locally and raises it globally. With others, it fights, defends, cooperates, and merges/assimilates. It gets sick, fights the antigens, heals itself, or dies. New super-organisms are spun off of or otherwise born from parents. We may look at the “evolution of language” through the lens of the human super-organism. Language is the DNA of culture, to make a rough analogy.
The dynamics that propagate the super-organism are not reducible to genetics. It’s a different level of description, because culture emerges from the interaction of large numbers of individuals. And you can’t deny that if one culture has guns and confronts another that doesn’t, that dynamic is going to place a harsh selective pressure indeed on the culture without the firepower. So genetics is not the whole story, and that’s what I mean by group selection.
In studying evolutionary biology, “group-selection” has a specific meaning, an individual sacrifices its own fitness in order to improve the group fitness.
I think it’s quite limiting to think strictly in terms of genetics, because there is more than one level of description going on when it comes to selection pressure.
It is interesting to take that step back and view the culture as an individual. The human super-organism (e.g., a tribe, or more generally, a culture) competes with others for resources. It consumes, metabolizes, and excretes, which is to say that it lowers entropy locally and raises it globally. With others, it fights, defends, cooperates, and merges/assimilates. It gets sick, fights the antigens, heals itself, or dies. New super-organisms are spun off of or otherwise born from parents. We may look at the “evolution of language” through the lens of the human super-organism. Language is the DNA of culture, to make a rough analogy.
The dynamics that propagate the super-organism are not reducible to genetics. It’s a different level of description, because culture emerges from the interaction of large numbers of individuals. And you can’t deny that if one culture has guns and confronts another that doesn’t, that dynamic is going to place a harsh selective pressure indeed on the culture without the firepower. So genetics is not the whole story, and that’s what I mean by group selection.