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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3920 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

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Might the emphasis that certain cultures place on family and clan commitment inadvertently cause selfish / sociopathic genes to flourish? If you have children with varying levels of sociopathy, then the most sociopathic of kin would benefit from the activity of the least sociopathic of kin, as they are both morally incentivized to benefit the family or clan as a whole, but the sociopathic one is a free-rider. If instead you have a culture without family or clan commitment, and instead relative free association, then the most-empathic / least-sociopathic progeny can form mutually beneficial “societies-in-miniature” with those from other families and clans, provided they have some method of weeding out free-riders and the hidden sociopathic. I think we could imagine such a shift happening when religious communities colonized North America. If this phenomenon is legitimate then it would weed out the sociopathic across generations.

People really, really like the idea of group selection but from an evolutionary perspective, it just doesn't seem to work out. People have tried it to model it, but it always ends up collapsing. The problem is precisely the "weeding out free-riders and the hidden sociopathic". Kin-selection does so automatically, since if you're cooperative, your relatives tend to be as well and if not vice versa. Furthermore, clan structures can and do weed out free-riders directly as well.

Btw, this does not mean that free association and broad cooperation is impossible long-term; It just means that you need to structure it in a reciprocal way so that everyone benefits.

I assume group selection works on bees and such? Are there any other society structures where it works? I was wondering if genocides could be such a selection mechanism, but it would have to be one's that do not involve taking all the women.

No, worker bees are sterile and afaik share half the genome of the queen, so serving the queen is in their direct "genetic interest". This is classic kin selection.

Is sterile the right word for something that can't reproduce sexually, but can still give birth? They start laying unfertilized drone eggs all over the place if there's no queen scent.

As you say, supporting the queen maximizes a worker's individual reproductive fitness, until there is no queen. Then it's every bee for herself.

Huh, you're clearly more knowledgeable about bees than I am. The queen suppressing the workers' reproduction with scent reminds of an argument I've heard; That, while the gay uncle hypothesis doesn't make evolutionary sense for the gay uncle himself, it does make sense for his siblings. Meaning, effectively castrating your brother so that he has to invest into your offspring is a viable strategy. It wasn't a very popular argument, however.

Nah, it's the opposite. Psychopaths can only thrive if they can meet new people to victimize. A close-knit community that stays together for a long time is the best defense against psychopaths.

The problem with genes that increase sociopathy is that if you've got one, your relatives more likely has it too. If you have a gene that causes you to steal resources from your sibling in a significantly negative-sum way, then that gene will on average reduce your own fitness too.

In any case this would only apply if children with more resources go on to have more children than those with less resources. That was probably true back when America was colonized, but not so much today.

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