[chubot]

Yeah I agree with this. I thought I read that scientists claim there's no such thing as "group selection" in evolution, i.e. where one individual in a group will do something bad for himself but good for the group (reproductively speaking).

Yeah it looks like wikipedia has a page on this controversy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection

Richard Dawkins apparently doesn't believe in it, and neither does Steven Pinker.

But just based on casual observation I think group selection is real (yes I know that's not scientific). Humans are like ants in many ways... some of us are "programmed" to perform specific roles.

[jadyoyster]

Don't ants in a colony all share the same genes and have the queen do all reproducing? (From the sperm of a single male possibly? I'm not super familiar.)

[chubot]

Yeah I'm not sure. I think ants are an extreme case, but I do think groups of humans have similar sorts of "mechanisms".

The book Sapiens repeats this over and over and I tend to agree. Religion, government, corporations, etc. are ways in which we cooperate with thousands or millions of others. We don't have to have the exact same genome, and it's not perfect cooperation, but there's something there.

[koverstreet]

If group selection wasn't a thing, multicellular organisms wouldn't exist.