To me that seems more to me like a group of academics who just can’t see “how” it’d work. We’ve seen that in field after field where practitioners rarely look outside their own field.

There’s no “magic” in evolution to make it work only on individuals. Evolution is going to follow game theory. In some scenarios the evolution of the group will over time be far more adaptive than that of an individual. It’s a math question, not a biology question.

To me evolutionary pressure isn't an on/off thing, it's like a signal in the noise. It's a vector with a direction and magnitude, facing varying levels of environmental resistance.

To be more specific, if there was enough "magnitude", evolution could potentially arrive at a perfect CRC. But the "resistance" requires a "magnitude" higher than evolution is willing to pay to reach that perfection. Likely in part due to the implicit complexity slope. Considering the systemic malfunction mutation can cause, one might assume this magnitude would be higher than it currently is. However, this is entirely speculation, and not falsifiable.

So when I think of evolutionary pressure I'm considering it as a component of the final vector, where a biologist might more pragmatically consider the total sum of vectors instead. This way of thinking is likely more productive for what they are doing.

As for evolution always selecting for the individual over the group, I'm surprised this is controversial when it's so obviously happening? If that was true how could multicellular organisms even exist? I'm very much not an expert on any of this, but this sounds like perhaps an over focus on DNA itself and not evolution as a whole, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

So is it just misunderstanding? Maybe they don't understand the question, or we don't understand the answer? Or they're hidebound, or incentivized somehow to be blind to the truth? Epistemological questions abound.

Meiosis, which produces both the sperm cells and the egg cells, is not a copying mechanism, unlike mitosis, which generates the other cells of a body.

Meiosis is a random generator, it randomly shuffles the DNA of the grandparents, which is stored in the father's cells, then it randomly selects half of it, producing a unique combination of genes in each sperm cell or egg cell.

The random genome generator together with the following filtering steps that will reject the bad variants, implement an optimum search algorithm for the fittest descendants.

Meiosis has greatly accelerated the evolution of the nucleated living beings (eukaryotes). Because favorable mutations are extremely rare, the probability of a living being accumulating multiple favorable mutations would have been negligible. With meiosis, if in a population 5 individuals have 1 favorable mutation each, there are good chances that soon some individuals will appear who have all 5 favorable mutations, then their descendants may become dominant and replace all others.

It's the peacock's tail effect: what relevance does a brightly colored tail have to a male peacock's actual fitness?

It also depends on how much of the sperm cell comes from the fathers genes, and how much is generated from the new DNA. I didn't find a clear answer to this but the following indicates that the new sperm cell is at least somewhat generated by the sperm DNA:

  Because nucleotide recombinations can occur during meiosis I, the genetic code of chromosomes of gametes can differ from that of somatic parent cells (ie., progeny cells might express cell-surface antigens that are recognized by the host [the father] as foreign and thus be eliminated by humoral or cellular immune mechanisms). Occluding junctions that interconnect adjacent Sertoli cells shield secondary spermatocytes, spermatids, and spermatozoa from autoimmune recognition.

And I'm completely ignoring the mitochondria (Dad's copy are not passed on so should be mostly irrelevant to sperm selection pressures). I'm pretty ignorant of this whole topic - high school biology only.

A lot of what's behind that "selection" there is still unknown; in principle all sperm are, more or less, the same.

There's also so many external effects in play that no single sperm cell may actually have a significant advantage over others; e.g. the behavior of the seminal fluid (ph, viscosity), the physical location of the egg, etc.

The cartoonish image of sperm swimming towards the egg is pretty much that ... a cartoon. In reality, they're pretty much drifting and their movement is much more like brownian motion than anything else [1].

Reminds me of this sperm race thing that took the spotlight a month ago, after watching the videos [2] ... come on, man.

Only someone who is extremely ignorant and/or is lacking severely on their mental abilities (bordering on idiocy), would believe that thing was true.

1: When the sperm is really close to the egg, however, there seems to be a hormone gradient that guides the sperm, preferentially, towards it.

2: https://x.com/beyoncegarden/status/1916278740214047182

Both reasons for the high count of sperm cells are true.

There must be many sperm cells to survive the adverse conditions, but there is also intense competition with the sibling sperm cells.

The DNA of the sperm cells is generated by a random generator, which is the meiosis mechanism, which randomly shuffles then randomly discards half of the father DNA.

The sperm competition then discards the random choices that happened to be bad, implementing an optimum search algorithm.

The sperm competition is only a first filter for rejecting bad random choices. Many embryos will die very soon, without ever developing, rejecting other bad random choices.

It’s useless for all that multicellular goodness that separates humans from fish. But making viable single cells is a prerequisite for everything that comes after. DNA that can’t make cell walls etc can’t make a person as such there’s a host of genetic anomalies that don’t result in a fetus let alone a live birth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis