> Mutations? Shuffling a deck of cards doesn't "mutate" any cards in the deck, but you will also never get the same sequence twice. I think you are mixing things up a bit about how our genes work from generation to generation.
I understand perfectly well the distinction between mutations and crossover, but I stick by my original language - to a large degree, competing alleles do ultimately arise via mutation (including insertion/deletion/other funny business), not crossover, which primarily just randomizes selection between different alleles rather than altering them in detail (human crossover probabilities are roughly 1% per million base pairs, which is too infrequent to be doing much bit twiddling within genes themselves, though it will occasionally happen).
> tl;dr Someone who is a long-living nobel prize winner is IMHO, a genetic success, regardless of procreation.
That's fine, but "genetic success" in the context of evolution means quite specifically that copies of their genes are more likely to be present N generations down the line than copies of competing ones.
In this sense, if your particular set of genes enables you to help all humanity equally in some significant way, you're doing your own genes no particular favor unless you somehow help your own family out more than others. That's not a moral judgment by any means, but it's the nature of the game of evolution...
I understand perfectly well the distinction between mutations and crossover, but I stick by my original language - to a large degree, competing alleles do ultimately arise via mutation (including insertion/deletion/other funny business), not crossover, which primarily just randomizes selection between different alleles rather than altering them in detail (human crossover probabilities are roughly 1% per million base pairs, which is too infrequent to be doing much bit twiddling within genes themselves, though it will occasionally happen).
> tl;dr Someone who is a long-living nobel prize winner is IMHO, a genetic success, regardless of procreation.
That's fine, but "genetic success" in the context of evolution means quite specifically that copies of their genes are more likely to be present N generations down the line than copies of competing ones.
In this sense, if your particular set of genes enables you to help all humanity equally in some significant way, you're doing your own genes no particular favor unless you somehow help your own family out more than others. That's not a moral judgment by any means, but it's the nature of the game of evolution...