I searched “sexual selection” on LessWrong for other prior examples. In 2021 Oliver Sourbut said
I think examples of sexual selection are adjacent but don’t qualify as gradient hacking
This search was also my first sight of the term “Fisherian runaway”; I think Fisher, like Darwin, had too narrow a concept of the spread of traits sexual selection ultimately controls, and Fisher’s influence was probably part of why Sourbut said that.
[ Ryan Kidd, 2022 ] IMO falls prey to this, but still decides that narrow examples of “Fisherian runaway” are mesa-optimizers [!].
Geoffrey Miller lays out the case in The Mating Mind that human creative intelligence, art, morality, and storytelling, all evolved under the pressure of sexual selection
The chimp-level task of modeling others, in the hominid line, led to improved self-modeling which supported recursion which enabled language which birthed politics that increased the selection pressure for outwitting which led to sexual selection on wittiness...
...or something. It’s hard to tell by looking at the fossil record what happened in what order and why. [ ambiguous; I include it mostly because I saw it referenced elsewhere while searching ]
In the case of hominids in particular over the last few million years, we may also have been experiencing accelerated selection on brain proteins, per se—which I would attribute to sexual selection, or brain variance accounting for a greater proportion of total fitness variance. [ ? last part is a confusing-to-me ambiguation ]
[ rogersbacon, 2023 ] has some comments on sexual selection which I think are just straight up backward:
For Charles Taylor, the first Axial Age resulted from the “great disembedding” of the person from isolated communities and their natural environment, where circumscribed awareness had been limited to the sustenance and survival of the tribe guided by oral narrative myth. The lifting out from a closed-off world, according to Taylor, was enabled by the arrival of written language — the stored memories of the first cloud technology. [ -- Nathan Gardels ]
There is an analogy to biological evolution that may be instructive. When all reproduction was asexual, gene variants/mutations were “embedded” in the genome in which they arose, and their spread depended largely on the fitness of their “host genome” (vertical/clonal reproduction). With the arrival of sexual reproduction and recombination roughly two billion years ago, genes could now free themselves from their native soil and spread (horizontally) to new genomic lands. Sexual reproduction also brought a new form of selection—sexual selection—that depended less on the physical environment and more on the composition of the gene pool.
But sexual selection means the gene is more constrained, more “embedded”, not less, than it was under natural selection.
Today I learned: [ brook, on the EA Forum, in 2023 ], independently [?] referred to sexual selection as one of the few available examples of mesa-optimization. Before writing [ this extensive treatment of the topic in 2024 ], I don’t remember seeing anyone make the connection.
I searched “sexual selection” on LessWrong for other prior examples. In 2021 Oliver Sourbut said
This search was also my first sight of the term “Fisherian runaway”; I think Fisher, like Darwin, had too narrow a concept of the spread of traits sexual selection ultimately controls, and Fisher’s influence was probably part of why Sourbut said that.
[ Ryan Kidd, 2022 ] IMO falls prey to this, but still decides that narrow examples of “Fisherian runaway” are mesa-optimizers [!].
[ lemonhope, in 2023 ], says
which pretty well encapsulates the force I think is actually driving a large percentage of modern evolution.
Other references [ none of which I’d been aware of before today ]:
[ Jacob Falkovich in 2020 ]:
[ Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2008 ]:
[ Also Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2008 ]:
[ rogersbacon, 2023 ] has some comments on sexual selection which I think are just straight up backward:
But sexual selection means the gene is more constrained, more “embedded”, not less, than it was under natural selection.