Coalitional Darwinism and the Instrumental Utility of Individuality

This post was written as part of MATS 9.1 under the mentorship of Richard Ngo. This post is the first of several I will be writing on using natural selection to understand artificial intelligence and agency. This post will show how noisy selection on genome structure can make evolution effectively non-myopic. From this, we give a Darwinian account of the emergence of 'individuals' constituted by coalitions of lower-level replicators. Later posts will develop the connection between genome-structu...