Lesson 34 — Capstone — What is an Individual? UNIT 5 CORE · synthesis
Seven of these laid side by side, and the question they keep asking.
A — The whole cascade side by side
Every transition the course named, each one run through the same two terms. Blue is the higher level, red the lower. Nothing here is a new calculation.
As you change scope, the individual becomes the population, and the population becomes the individual. Are his left and right arms the same individual? It depends on the scope. There's no privileged level. The thing we usually call "the individual" is just the level we happen to be looking at.
— 202_lec29_05
B — Run it above the individual, and off DNA entirely
Two more settings of the same machine. In the first, no individual is fitter than any other. In the second, nothing is made of DNA.
Predict first. Lineages whose members all have exactly the same fitness, but which differ in how readily they split. The lower-level term will be:
higher level: — lower level: — the trait: —
Aliens on another planet — are they going to use nucleotides? Almost certainly not. If they do, it won't be in the same sequences. But they'll still have heredity. So what does heredity mean? It can't be DNA-centric.
— 202_lec31_02
C — Why we exist at the level we do
Your neurons cooperate because they're nearly genetically identical. The cost to a neuron to help another nearly identical neuron isn't actually a cost — genetically speaking. That's why thought is possible — your neurons aren't trying to destroy each other.
— 202_lec30_03
Across the cascade in Stage A, the gap between the two terms is not the same size everywhere. Where it is widest, the lower level has least left to gain by defecting.
D — The story of George Price
George Price hated his own equation. He wanted altruism to be real. So he set out to live a refutation of it. He converted to Christianity, gave away all his stuff, and went around doing random acts of kindness that in no way benefited him — for strangers in another country he had no relatedness to.
— 202_lec32_03
Nothing to compute here. Price wrote down the identity you have been running all lesson, saw what it said about why anything helps anything else, and could not live with it. He died in 1975, by his own hand, in a squat in London. The equation is not wrong. Sit with that for a moment before the last panel.
E — Course bookend
Evolution is not like gravity. It's not a force that exists independent of things. It's more like motion. Evolution is the net change that results from many forces — a lot of things operating at once causing a change. That net change is what we call evolution.
— 202_lec01_03
A net change, coming apart into named pieces. You have been doing that since you first put a line through a cloud of dots. The last thing to add is that the things those forces act on — the gene, the chromosome, the cell, you, the colony, the lineage — are not given in advance. Each one became a thing to act on when the accounting closed around it.