Selection Selection


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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 selectionvariable Avariable 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…

Comments

  1. lochaber says

    whenever something about our society and natural selection comes up, I’m reminded of something I read a ways back in (I think?) The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner.

    It was a rather brief passage, but at one point there is mention of some of the Galapagos Island finches that subsist primarily on nectar from cacti flowers. There had been observations of finches tearing open new cactus flower buds, before they fully open, to get early access to the nectar, but killing the flower in the process. This gives that individual finch an advantage, but at the cost of all of the other nectar-eating finches, and eventually the cacti, and all the other finches and other organisms that are reliant on the cacti, as without flowers, cacti can’t reproduce, and will eventually die out. leading to other species dying out as well (including the finch that started all this…).

    I just felt it really paralleled some of the situations we see in society – a few individuals benefit at the cost of everyone else, and are destroying something we all need to survive. And a lot of us can see the destruction and long-term impacts, but that doesn’t have any effect on those being destructive. At least the finches had the excuse of not being able to comprehend systems, or being able to make long-term predictions and plans…

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