[shadowgovt]

I have no idea. My point is it's irrelevant for modern humans.

As a social construct: caste could be useful for specialization. But I sort of fail to see the point of making the specialization birth-based (observation seems to indicate that people's interests and skills, particularly in technology spaces which dominate the human condition now, are randomized / environment based more than bred. Give me an interested kid who wants to be a programmer, and I can teach them how to program regardless of who their parents were).

Whether there's some natural selective pressure to encourage caste is irrelevant in the modern human condition. Probably better to optimize for letting people have experiences and finding what fits them best under the theory that people do the best work / live the best lives if they're doing what they're into.

[asow92]

Can it truly be irrelevant? Our so called society may be modern based on some subjective chronocentric premise, but our biology and the sociological patterns from which they are derived are largely just as they've been for millennia.

My point is that we can attempt adjudicate out our biological programming through social conditioning, but it's still there lurking under the surface. It's built into us and we can never truly hope to escape it as long as we shall live.

[shadowgovt]

Okay, but again: how is that relevant?

Some of us are conditioned to want to murder. Those people, if they act on that impulse, are murderers and we jail or slay them. There were probably good evolutionary reasons to kill those like oneself in the past, but context has changed and what was once perhaps evolutionarily advantageous (elimination of resource competition) is now counter-advantageous (elimination of members of society and allies, not to mention the vast resources spent on defense if "You can just kill who you want" were to become part of the social code; those resources can be spent otherwise if people check their urges).

Yes, we're riddled with dangerous evolutionary baggage. Yes, perhaps it never goes away. We learn to regulate it so that we can live in a society, because none of us are as strong as all of us.

If anything, one of the greatest risks to modern humanity is the risk that we will fail to regulate such urges. Because the urge to murder, the urge to divide, the urge to have ingroups and outgroups... Those urges are an existential threat in a world of nukes and gene-engineered virii, where someone acting on such an urge could slaughter a whole city or a whole species.

[asow92]

The resolution is: evolution prefers a social caste system.

You're going way off into a sidebar. It doesn't matter if you think it's relevant or not, but that if it is true or not.