Sublime

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers. —John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”

My views are consistent with those who hold that moral instincts in individuals are genetic adaptations sometimes detectable even in non-human primates;1 that social norms are products of interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution;2 that natural selection can act at the level of the group and not just at the level of the individu

Pour ce qui me concerne, je suis un individualiste. Je crois que la course est gagnée par le plus rapide, la bataille par le plus fort. Telle est la leçon que j’ai apprise, ou que je crois avoir apprise, de la biologie. Comme je vous l’ai dit, je suis un individualiste, et l’individualisme est l’ennemi héréditaire et éternel du socialisme.

While there are several candidates for the most important equation in evolutionary biology, I would pick Price’s Equation, which in its simplest formulation reads: ▵cov(vi, zi) change in average characteristic = covariance(relative fitness, characteristic). This is a very powerful and general formula. For example, a particular gene for height can b