#please note that im using fitness and strategy here in the scientific sense

[heedra]

I think about that all the time. Like at what point can we see the phenotype evolving to facilitate social fitness at the expense of raw survival ability? Surely the roles of orca coloration or elephant ears or human eyebrows are primarily social, even if we can think of slight ways they are adaptive to the environment.

I think one thing to keep in mind is that in evolutionary theory there's no real difference between 'raw survival ability' and things like social fitness. at the end of the day evolutionary trends depend first and foremost on nothing more complex than which animals are living to reproduce. The complex part is that there are a huge array of adaptations and environmental factors and completely out-of-left-field occurrences that can shape the demographic trends in who is doing so within a species. Having a social group to rely on can be great for keeping one alive, so it's no surprise there are a wide variety of animals on this planet who have evolved to favor social complexity. In general, hallmarks of social 'complexity' are more common in animals than we generally believe. Especially when you're talking about vertebrates, and especially when you're talking about avians and mammals, there's a lot of evidence that some of the things we hold up as keystones of sophisticated social behavior are often more common than not. The animals we tend to talk about as being more socially sophisticated tend to be the animals whose social behavior most closely resembles ours from our perspective, but this is ultimately a skewed way of evaluating any sort of 'intelligence' in animals. A lot of animals people have deemed 'stupid' throughout history, such as chickens or cows, may ultimately perform poorly at demonstrating the arbitrary cognitive skills necessary to seem 'smart' to us, but their social behaviors and cognition are quite robust in their own way. What that all means, I guess, is that, for one, I think socio-behavioral adaptations are way more common than we like to give them credit for, and it's therefore as unsurprising to see them get highly specialized as it is to see any other adaptation become highly specialized. I think it's important to acknowledge that the reason we see these behaviors as particularly special is because we are geared to want to see ourselves in everything and to get excited when we think we do; the very reason we think of dolphins and elephants as being so particularly sophisticated is because of the specific specialized social behaviors we all seem to exhibit. That being said, I do think that inter-generational learning is about as highly specialized a social adaptation as one can find out there, so it's still no less of an interesting question to ask WHY these particular groups of animals have these skills in common, though. In conclusion/TLDR though, I'd say it's not at all contrary to an animal's fitness to evolve traits that aid mainly in social functions, when prosocial behavior is as much an adaptive strategy as any other.