Yes. I said “most successful new species in history according to the utility function of evolution”.
There are about 100k to 300k chimpanzees (similar for gorillas, orangutans, etc) for example, compared to ~8 billion humans. So we are over 4 OOM more successful than related lineages.
We are far and away the most successful recent species by a landslide, and probably the most successful mammal ever. There are almost as many humans as there are bats (summing over all 1,400 known bat species). There are a bit more humans in the world than rats (summing over all 60 rat species) - a much older ultra-successful lineage.
By biomass, humans alone—a single species—accounts for almost half of the land mammal biomass, and our domesticated food sources account for the other half. Biomass is perhaps a better estimate of genetic replicator success, as larger animals have more cells and thus more gene copies.
Your argument indicates that humans are successful (by said metric) among mammals, but doesn’t address how it compares to insects. As I understand it, some insect species have both more many more individuals and much more biomass than humans
I think I get the issue here. You seem to be aggregating over IGF of every human gene in the human population.
The sheer stupidity of our civilization and the rate at which we are hurtling towards extinction does imply that we are not ‘aligned’ to IGF, though—so I disagree.
The unit of selection is the gene, not the species. Aggregating over a species is not a proxy for the success of a gene replicator—why not aggregate over apes instead, or European-origin races instead?
Yes. I said “most successful new species in history according to the utility function of evolution”. There are about 100k to 300k chimpanzees (similar for gorillas, orangutans, etc) for example, compared to ~8 billion humans. So we are over 4 OOM more successful than related lineages.
We are far and away the most successful recent species by a landslide, and probably the most successful mammal ever. There are almost as many humans as there are bats (summing over all 1,400 known bat species). There are a bit more humans in the world than rats (summing over all 60 rat species) - a much older ultra-successful lineage.
By biomass, humans alone—a single species—accounts for almost half of the land mammal biomass, and our domesticated food sources account for the other half. Biomass is perhaps a better estimate of genetic replicator success, as larger animals have more cells and thus more gene copies.
We are the anomaly.
Your argument indicates that humans are successful (by said metric) among mammals, but doesn’t address how it compares to insects. As I understand it, some insect species have both more many more individuals and much more biomass than humans
I think I get the issue here. You seem to be aggregating over IGF of every human gene in the human population.
The sheer stupidity of our civilization and the rate at which we are hurtling towards extinction does imply that we are not ‘aligned’ to IGF, though—so I disagree.
I agree that conditional on humanity going extinct, the seeming success of our species by a genetic metric would only be a false success.
The unit of selection is the gene, not the species. Aggregating over a species is not a proxy for the success of a gene replicator—why not aggregate over apes instead, or European-origin races instead?