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Does evolutionary pressure only exist on individuals? I’ve never heard that. There’s a wide variety of species that are highly socially organized, do you not accept that that’s through evolutionarily pressure?

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Tudsamfa@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I never said that. What I meant is that a behaviour, which benefits a species as a whole but reduces one individual’s fitness, is not evolutionary competitive. It’s evolutionary game theory, like the prisoners dilemma from normal game theory.

And to determine if some behaviour is such a dilemma, you have to consider costs and benefits of it, which is not at all clear in natural situations. That’s why I said it needs to be studied.

But I must concede, I sort of assumed what exactly you called an evolutionary advantage. Common homosexuality in penguins or not discriminating against homosexual individuals in penguins have very different analysis here.

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