Right, the part about layers of more and less conserved genes is true AFAIK. (I think actually ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny linearly, but rather there’s a kinda of hourglass structure where some mid-development checkpoints are most conserved—but I’m not remembering where I saw this—possibly in a book or paper by Rupert Riedl or Günter Wagner.)
What I’m objecting to, is viewing that as a growth of a values structure for the values of [the evolution of a species, as an agent]. That’s because that entity doesn’t really value genes at all; it doesn’t care about the payload of genes. Individual genes selfishly care about themselves as a payload, being payloaded into the gene pool of the species; each variant wants its frequency to go up. The species-evolution doesn’t care about that. I think the species-evolution is a less coherent way of imputing agency to evolution compared to selfish genes, though still interesting. But if impute values to a species-evolution, I’m not sure what you’d get, and I think it would be something like “performs well in this ecological niche”—though there would be edge cases that are harder to describe, such as long-term trends due to sexual selection or due for example to any sort of frequency-dependent effects of genes.
Right, the part about layers of more and less conserved genes is true AFAIK. (I think actually ontogeny doesn’t recapitulate phylogeny linearly, but rather there’s a kinda of hourglass structure where some mid-development checkpoints are most conserved—but I’m not remembering where I saw this—possibly in a book or paper by Rupert Riedl or Günter Wagner.)
What I’m objecting to, is viewing that as a growth of a values structure for the values of [the evolution of a species, as an agent]. That’s because that entity doesn’t really value genes at all; it doesn’t care about the payload of genes. Individual genes selfishly care about themselves as a payload, being payloaded into the gene pool of the species; each variant wants its frequency to go up. The species-evolution doesn’t care about that. I think the species-evolution is a less coherent way of imputing agency to evolution compared to selfish genes, though still interesting. But if impute values to a species-evolution, I’m not sure what you’d get, and I think it would be something like “performs well in this ecological niche”—though there would be edge cases that are harder to describe, such as long-term trends due to sexual selection or due for example to any sort of frequency-dependent effects of genes.