Political Biology

From Philocelot
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One of the primary aspects of political "wing" is how it handles variation in individuals:

  • left: each individual should be provided with whatever they need in order to best express themselves in a positive way (ocelot), regardless of net benefit
  • right: the quality of society (often couched as "the race") must be continuously improved by culling those who are the least desirable -- preferably as soon as possible, to minimize social cost

This maps fairly well to r- and K- selection in biology, where any given species tends to be somewhere on a range between these two extremes:

  • r-selection: These species put only a small investment of resources into each offspring, but produce many such low effort babies. Such species are also generally not very invested in protecting or rearing these young.
  • K-selection: These species tend towards heavy investment in each offspring and tend to have longer-lived individuals with a longer period of maturation to adulthood, heavy parental care and nurturing, often a period of teaching the young, and fierce protection of the babies by the parents.