What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

Re:What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger by Qwertious on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @05:38AM (#8728577)

I would be very, VERY sceptical - the moment he brought in evolution, he argued a theory based on (and nigh-identical to) group selectionism. Except group selectionism has been thoroughly debunked, to the point where he might as well have been spouting Lamarckism - read "The Selfish Gene", by Richard Dawkins.

Put simply, you can't just jump from looking at individual survival to looking at a group's survival, because any individual could just be a free-rider. More importantly, what's actually been observed is that group selectionism simply doesn't happen in the real world.

So while anything I said about the rest would be mere opinion, there is at least one multi-paragraph section of his argument that is a GIANT heap of shit.

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Re:What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger by mitteldorf on Thursday December 11, 2014 @07:31AM (#8734366)

The Selfish Gene was a phase in our understanding of evolution. The mainstream now agrees that evolution is a whole lot more complicated than that. It's still true that "group selection" is a dirty word to a majority of evolutionary scientists, but this is shifting pretty fast - much less true than it was 10 years ago. Take a look at the works of David Sloan Wilson. I recommend his book, Unto Others. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674930476

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