Comment by elcritch

> And in any event, evolution always selects for the fitness of the individual, not the species— group selection is a very controversial topic in evobio, but the general consensus is that it does not happen

To me that seems more to me like a group of academics who just can’t see “how” it’d work. We’ve seen that in field after field where practitioners rarely look outside their own field.

There’s no “magic” in evolution to make it work only on individuals. Evolution is going to follow game theory. In some scenarios the evolution of the group will over time be far more adaptive than that of an individual. It’s a math question, not a biology question.