I’ve previously argued that genetic fitness is a measure of selection strength, not the selection target. What evolution selects for are traits that happen to be useful in the organism’s current environment. The extent to which a trait is useful in the organism’s current environment can be quantified as fitness, but fitness is specific to a particular environment and the same trait might have a very different fitness in some other environment.
I guess I don’t really understand what you’re asking. I meant my comment as an answer to this bit in the OP:
I think it’s common on LessWrong to think of evolution’s selection target as inclusive genetic fitness—that evolution tries to create organisms which make as many organisms with similar DNA to themselves as possible. But what exactly does this select for?
In that evolution selecting for “inclusive genetic fitness” doesn’t really mean selecting for anything in particular; what exactly that ends up selecting for is completely dependent on the environment (where “the environment” also includes the species itself, which is relevant for things like sexual selection or frequency-dependent selection).
If you fix the environment, assuming for the sake of argument that it’s possible to do that, then the exact thing it selects for are just the traits that are useful in that environment.
Do humans have high inclusive genetic fitness?
I think it’s a bit of a category mistake to ask about the inclusive fitness of a species. You could calculate the average fitness of an individual within the species, but at least to my knowledge (caveat: I’m not a biologist) that’s not very useful. Usually it’s individual genotypes or phenotypes within the species that are assigned a fitness.
The OP is more of a statement that you get different results depending on whether you focus on organism count or biomass or energy flow. I motivate this line of inquiry by a question about what evolution selects for, but that’s secondary to the main point.
I’ve previously argued that genetic fitness is a measure of selection strength, not the selection target. What evolution selects for are traits that happen to be useful in the organism’s current environment. The extent to which a trait is useful in the organism’s current environment can be quantified as fitness, but fitness is specific to a particular environment and the same trait might have a very different fitness in some other environment.
But the problem I mention seems to still apply even if you hold the environment fixed.
I guess I don’t really understand what you’re asking. I meant my comment as an answer to this bit in the OP:
In that evolution selecting for “inclusive genetic fitness” doesn’t really mean selecting for anything in particular; what exactly that ends up selecting for is completely dependent on the environment (where “the environment” also includes the species itself, which is relevant for things like sexual selection or frequency-dependent selection).
If you fix the environment, assuming for the sake of argument that it’s possible to do that, then the exact thing it selects for are just the traits that are useful in that environment.
I think it’s a bit of a category mistake to ask about the inclusive fitness of a species. You could calculate the average fitness of an individual within the species, but at least to my knowledge (caveat: I’m not a biologist) that’s not very useful. Usually it’s individual genotypes or phenotypes within the species that are assigned a fitness.
The OP is more of a statement that you get different results depending on whether you focus on organism count or biomass or energy flow. I motivate this line of inquiry by a question about what evolution selects for, but that’s secondary to the main point.