[extropy-chat] RE: Re: Intelligent Designand IrriducibleComplexity

[Kevin Freels]

True, but you may want to consider ants for a moment. The individual is not
all that important to the group. As environmental conditions change,
adaptations actually occur more often in the group's behavior than they do
in the structure and form of the individual ants themselves. Whether this is
a sign of "group" change or a collection of minor adaptations in individual
ant brains is hard to say, but interesting to think about nonetheless.

Another thought on ants: An ant brain has about 250,000 brain cells. A human
brain has about 10,000 million. So a colony of 40,000 ants has a collective
brain roughly the size of a human. (Can't remember the source)





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eliezer Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 3:20 PM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] RE: Re: Intelligent Designand
IrriducibleComplexity


> Spike wrote:
> >
> > If that is the case, then we have an example of
> > natural selection working at the group level.  But
> > this only works if we use the term natural selection
> > to include both survival selection and mate selection.
> > If we allow natural selection to work at the group
> > level, we suggest some possible solutions to the
> > more difficult puzzles of evolution.
>
> Group selection may be the wrong word for this, since it's usually taken
to
> imply a conflict between individual-level selection and group-level
> selection with the group selection pressure winning.  What you're talking
> about is an isolated subpopulation undergoing genetic drift augmented by
> sexual selection, that then pops up and outcompetes other subpopulations.
> That's not 'group selection' as usually defined because there's no obvious
> conflict between group-level selection pressure and individual-level
> selection pressure.  No one denies that groups (such as human tribes) are
> occasionally the vehicles selected upon; the difficult part is for
> group-level selection pressure to ever defeat a countervailing individual
> selection pressure.
>
> -- 
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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