A genetic lineage may both lose resources to adopting and gain them from being adopted at different times — and where that nets out over 1000+ generations isn’t immediately clear. Survival benefits from having more members at the cost of some resources now is even less clear.
This may be a case of a benefit being selected for on a multi-generational scale; or it could be as you say and a disadvantage.
My argument isn't about if it's advantageous or not. It's that the mechanism (DNA, a long string) may not be well-suited to expressing and adjusting very complex emergent behaviours in the phenotype. There may either not be a way at all to express "show strong maternal instincts but reject all non-related children and surrogate children like pets", or there are too many steps to get there and natural selection would never find it in any reasonable evolutionary timescale.
> My argument isn't about if it's advantageous or not.
I don't know if you're being fair to yourself. It's probably advantageous to have simple heuristics for determining if you should care for something, if that something will turn out to be your offspring 98% of the time. What possible pressure would there be to push that to 100%?
It would be possible for DNA to do better with some sort of signalling. Select for kids that inherit a smell, for example. But to develop that you'd have to start with a bunch of false negatives, and a bunch of deceptive smells would develop to start giving you false positives again.
Nobody is actually doing the calculations, the decisions are arrived at from what evolution has built into us, hard wired based on what has worked in order to get us here.
"Already I can see the chain reaction: the chemical precursors that signal the onset of an emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you to the simple and obvious truth"
A genetic lineage may both lose resources to adopting and gain them from being adopted at different times — and where that nets out over 1000+ generations isn’t immediately clear. Survival benefits from having more members at the cost of some resources now is even less clear.
This may be a case of a benefit being selected for on a multi-generational scale; or it could be as you say and a disadvantage.