The Green Beard Mechanism is Bogus

This essay is a lightly reworked version of material from Debunking the Selfish Gene . Reproductive altruism can’t evolve, because it is less adaptive than reproductive selfishness. Suppose that a population contains organisms of both types. Some are reproductively altruistic toward other members of the population. The rest are reproductively selfish. The selfish organisms receive a benefit from…