Midi

Now, there is no competition between individual organelles – the fitness of an organelle is locked to the fitness of the entire organism.

This point confuses me. As soon as organelle replication is capped by organismal replication (e.g. after endosymbiosis happened and the organelle was well and truly trapped, unable to replicate without 'host' factors) then organelle fitness would be locked to the fitness of the entire organism, right? I'm not clear on how sex & mating types make the incentives of the organelle and whole cell *more* aligned?

Problems with remission previously made me broadly skeptical of the "go whack some target" approach. It seemed like every cool new drug just puts the cancer in remission until it adapts and kills you, meaning improvements to long-term survival were not great. This made me skeptical of target searches in general: Once you hit all the obvious things whatever strategy the cancer had found to survive would be too complicated to drug. In general it seemed like people were generalizing too much from approaches that make sense for non-cancer diseases, where the t... (read more)

Sounds a lot like the phyles of The Diamond Age.

Am I missing out on any kind of "nutrient" by not doing it?

You may be missing out on some fun. I have to recommend "Caveman Chemistry" 's brief treatment of the subject. 

Thank you for the clarification! 

Nice post. Is there some subtle distinction between $\mu$ and $\text{E}$ I'm missing, or are they synonyms as used here?