Eliezer Yudkowsky

being optimistic about what the utterly alien optimization process of natural selection will produce in the way of how it optimizes its objectives.

You got people arguing that like in the early days, biologists said, well, like organisms will restrain their own reproduction when resources are scarce so as not to overfeed the system.

And this is not how natural selection works.

It's about whose genes are relatively more prevalent in the next generation.

And if you restrain reproduction, those genes get less frequent in the next generation compared to your conspecifics.

And

Natural selection doesn't do that.

In fact, predators overrun prey populations all the time and have crashes.

That's just like a thing that happens.

And many years later, the people said like, well, but group selection, right?

What about groups of organisms?

And basically the math of group selection almost never works out in practice is the answer there.

But also years later, somebody actually ran the experiment where they took populations of insects and selected the whole populations to have lower sizes.

And you just take pop one, pop two, pop three, pop four, look at which has the lowest total number of them in the next generation and select that one.

What do you suppose happens when you select populations of insects like that?

Well, what happens is not that the individuals in the population evolved to restrain their breeding, but that they evolved to kill the offspring of other organisms, especially the girls.

So people imagined this lovely, beautiful, harmonious output of natural selection, which is

these populations restraining their own breeding so that groups of them would stay in harmony with the resources available.

And mostly the math never works out for that.

But if you actually apply the weird, strange conditions to get group selection that beats individual selection, what you get is female infanticide.