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That's if you take a very narrow view of individual selection. A group of organisms collectively may have favorable selection characteristics compared to another group that dies younger, even if the death is post-reproductive age.

Bees, for example, have evolved to have very strong but non-reproducing organisms in a community. There's still selection pressure on a hive to produce stronger and longer lived workers.

As I understand it, the general mechanism involved here is usually called kin selection, and has been discussed as far back as Darwin, both as a potential problem with the theory and as a fatal defect in the Lamarckian view.




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