Your assumption that the immortals all choose not to reproduce is unrealistic. (for an evolutionary equilibrium) Either 1) Nothing can kill them, nothing can stop them reproducing. Exponentially expanding ball of flesh, stopped from collapsing into a black hole by shear imortality.
2) Absolutely unkillable, need some resource to reproduce. That resource is the bottleneck.
3) Can die of something sometimes. Malthusian equilibrium. The more stuff they can’t die of, the better they do compared to the “mortals”.
The winning strategy is to take the immortality pill and reproduce. Voluntarily stopping having children to prevent over-crowding only works if everybody does it.
Your assumption that the immortals all choose not to reproduce is unrealistic. (for an evolutionary equilibrium) Either 1) Nothing can kill them, nothing can stop them reproducing. Exponentially expanding ball of flesh, stopped from collapsing into a black hole by shear imortality.
2) Absolutely unkillable, need some resource to reproduce. That resource is the bottleneck.
3) Can die of something sometimes. Malthusian equilibrium. The more stuff they can’t die of, the better they do compared to the “mortals”.
The winning strategy is to take the immortality pill and reproduce. Voluntarily stopping having children to prevent over-crowding only works if everybody does it.
He addresses this in the section “If the Immortals do continue to have babies, their second-order fitness is still pretty bad”.
Doesn’t matter. Taking the immortality pill grants a strict competitive advantage over people who don’t take it.
The OP is not arguing on the individual level but on the population level. It is not uncommon that populations evolve to extinction.
It seems that this post is describing the regime beyond the threshold where group advantages outweigh individual advantages.