But wheels is not invoking kin selection, but group selection - when we're talking about worker bees helping out the rest of the hive, that's kin selection, because they share a genetic line, and the presence of a gene is directly correlated with the presence a generation or two down the line.
When we talk about a long-living Nobel Prize winner that doesn't have children, the things that such a person does "for the world" are irrelevant to the propagation of his/her specific genes, except as they directly affect the people in the population that actually have those genes. If their contributions help everyone equally, their genes will not rise in frequency within the overall population, and hence, the mutations are failures, genetically speaking.
>If their contributions help everyone equally, their genes will not rise in frequency within the overall population, and hence, the mutations are failures, genetically speaking.
Mutations? Shuffling a deck of cards doesn't "mutate" any cards in the deck, but you will also never get the same sequence twice. I think you are mixing things up a bit about how our genes work from generation to generation.
I think that must just be an opinion. It falls short of observing everything relevant to what our genes, and what we as individuals and as species are "winning" for. It might work to say such a thing on the meta scale, but it just doesnt work to say that about someone whose DNA is undoubtedly fully represented in his/her extended family, et al. For instance, my opinion of what I would call a genetic failure would be one which persists continually without ever contributing to the greater human intellect.
It's also worth noting that we have little knowledge of genes anyways, but that might fall on deaf ears.
tl;dr Someone who is a long-living nobel prize winner is IMHO, a genetic success, regardless of procreation.
> Mutations? Shuffling a deck of cards doesn't "mutate" any cards in the deck, but you will also never get the same sequence twice. I think you are mixing things up a bit about how our genes work from generation to generation.
I understand perfectly well the distinction between mutations and crossover, but I stick by my original language - to a large degree, competing alleles do ultimately arise via mutation (including insertion/deletion/other funny business), not crossover, which primarily just randomizes selection between different alleles rather than altering them in detail (human crossover probabilities are roughly 1% per million base pairs, which is too infrequent to be doing much bit twiddling within genes themselves, though it will occasionally happen).
> tl;dr Someone who is a long-living nobel prize winner is IMHO, a genetic success, regardless of procreation.
That's fine, but "genetic success" in the context of evolution means quite specifically that copies of their genes are more likely to be present N generations down the line than copies of competing ones.
In this sense, if your particular set of genes enables you to help all humanity equally in some significant way, you're doing your own genes no particular favor unless you somehow help your own family out more than others. That's not a moral judgment by any means, but it's the nature of the game of evolution...
When we talk about a long-living Nobel Prize winner that doesn't have children, the things that such a person does "for the world" are irrelevant to the propagation of his/her specific genes, except as they directly affect the people in the population that actually have those genes. If their contributions help everyone equally, their genes will not rise in frequency within the overall population, and hence, the mutations are failures, genetically speaking.