• for: social organization - evolutionary purpose,
• paraphrase
  • human social organization exists to maximize
    • the extraction of energy from the environment to the group and individual (X), and
    • the efficiency of the conversion of extracted energy into offspring (E). -This is identical to the claim that
    • social organization exists to maximize the fitness of the group (Wilson and Sober 1994) and/or the individuals which compose the group (Nowak et al. 2010),
  • given an energetic definition of fitness.

• for: energy offspring, natural selection energy
• paraphrase
  • Pianka (1970) argued that, “…natural selection will usually act to maximize the amounts of matter and energy gathered per unit time.”
  • Brown et al. (1993) likewise offered an energetic definition in which fitness is “reproductive power, or the rate of conversion of energy into offspring.”
  • This reproductive power was taken to be a function of both
    • the rate of assimilation of energy from the environment and
    • the rate of conversion of energy to offspring (but see (Kozlowski 1996)).

Andersen, K.G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W.I. et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med 26, 450–452 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9