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#3279·Benjamin Davies, 5 days ago… any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals.
Why “at the expense of its rivals”? Isn’t the concern to spread at all, regardless of the outcome of rivals?
I’m using standard neo-Darwinian phrasing. Compare, for example, BoI chapter 4:
The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.
And, same chapter:
[T]he knowledge embodied in genes is knowledge of how to get themselves replicated at the expense of their rivals.
See also several instances in chapter 15 in the context of meme evolution.
Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene has a ton on rivals (alleles), too, for example (chapter 2):
Ways of increasing stability and of decreasing rivals’ stability became more elaborate and more efficient. Some of them may even have ‘discovered’ how to break up molecules of rival varieties chemically, and to use the building blocks so released for making their own copies.