You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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