[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Anomalocaris]

I keep rereading this comment to try to understand what exactly you're saying about the whole abstract realm bit, but I'm just not getting it, so I'll address the last sentence of this quote and hope this addresses the first sentences.

There's no continuity between your genes and your sister's, but there is some continuity between your genes and your parents' genes, which also happen to be somewhat continuous with your sister's genes.

I won't pretend to know the exact mechanisms that come with kin selection. There are experts instead you can ask about that.

The issue I'm highlighting is one of identity. The genes in my body are different from the genes in your body, even if they are the same sequence, say if we're twins. If I die, my genes do not benefit from your survival in the same way that I as a person do not benefit from your survival. My genes and I will both decompose on the ground.

However, genes are treated as if their identity transcended across all the members of the population in which the sequence exists. This mindset probably stems from population genetics in which the individuals are invisible, and all you have left is a gene pool.

If you and I are twins, and are both named Bob, people still treat us as separate people with separate identities. But now, let's say for the sake of example that codon sequence GGA is now the gene named Bob. If we both have sequence GGA in our genome, it's treated as if Bob exists in both of us simultaneously. Or as if Bob exists somewhere out in the philosophical ether, and merely has its tentacles in us. We're sharing Bob's existence. Kin selection works because if I die to save you, Bob only loses me as a tentacle but continues living in you. Bob didn't die with me, he's still alive and benefited from the altruism.

It's an identity and continuity issue because at the microscopic level genes are treated as transcending across the population, but at the macroscopic level entire genomes are treated as distinct individuals. My genome and I don't continue existing in my twin brother if I die and he survives.

Evolution fundamentally doesn’t know about YOU.   It doesn’t really want to know whether YOUR genes, as in the set of DNAs contained in the physical you, survive, at all.

What it notices is which particular style of genes survive in the gene pool.

Your survival and the survival of your offspring only potentially matter in so far as these might correlate to the survival a particular style of gene you carry, not the very same genes you carry.

Your genes by definition is of the same style as your genes.   So the survival of your genes necessary means the survival of your style of genes.    But the survival of your style of genes doesn’t require the survival of your genes, so long as there are others to carry your style of genes. 

So If you contain a style of gene that causes you to become inclined to help others at your own expense who phenotypically appears to you to resemble you in some important way, and you also have a gene which causes you to be more inclined to notice and be influenced by such phenotypical resemblances as correlating to a higher than normal genetic resemblance to you, then your inclination to help others is selected for not because it makes you more likely to survive, but because it makes the genes similar to that which you carry, more likely to survive.

Remember, evolution when viewed in the long term is fundamentally not about the selection of the fittest individuals to survive.   It is about the selection of the most survivable genes