Pissing on your neighbor can actually help the system as a whole. If information is not moving from one group to another, the patches don't get the systemwide benefits of experimentation. Everybody trying to solve spillover problems from other jurisdictions shifts the whole system, maybe to a higher peak on the fitness landscape. Cut the legs off all the workers, and the system will probably end up in a decline. The hard part is finding the configurations that produce rises - social welfare, in the case of public policy, or better cockroaches in the case of evolution.
Evolution is a search algorithm to find higher and higher positions on the fitness landscape.
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