Wynne-Edwards, V. Google Scholar. Haldane, J. Hamilton, W. Article Google Scholar. Stephens, S. Nicholson, A. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Reprints and Permissions. Group Selection and Kin Selection. Nature , — Download citation.
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All parties agree that differential group success is common in nature. Dawkins uses the example of red squirrels being outcompeted by grey squirrels. However, as he notes, intuitively this is not a case of genuine group selection, as the success of one group and the decline of another was a side-effect of individual level selection.
This distinction is crucial; however it cannot even be expressed in terms of the standard formalisms that biologists use to describe the evolutionary process, as these are statistical not causal. The distinction is related to the more general question of how to understand causality in hierarchical systems that has long troubled philosophers of science. Recently, a number of authors have argued that the opposition between kin and multi-level or group selection is misconceived, on the grounds that the two are actually equivalent—a suggestion first broached by W.
Hamilton as early as Proponents of this view argue that kin and multi-level selection are simply alternative mathematical frameworks for describing a single evolutionary process, so the choice between them is one of convention not empirical fact.
However, the equivalence in question is a formal equivalence only. A correct expression for evolutionary change can usually be derived using either the kin or multi-level selection frameworks, but it does not follow that they constitute equally good causal descriptions of the evolutionary process. This suggests that the persistence of the group selection controversy can in part be attributed to the mismatch between the scientific explanations that evolutionary biologists want to give, which are causal, and the formalisms they use to describe evolution, which are usually statistical.
To make progress, it is essential to attend carefully to the subtleties of the relation between statistics and causality. He is the author of numerous articles and two OUP books: Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction and Evolution and the Levels of Selection , which was awarded the Lakatos Prize for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science.
Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities. We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Or subscribe to articles in the subject area by email or RSS. Because selection is at the gene level I would argue there is some individual selection and group selection as well in the sense that the genes in the body want to replicate themselves.
Kin selection results from recognising this compatibility on a gene level. Kin selection believes in the former. Group selection believes in the latter. Kin selection, group selection and altruism: a controversy without end?
The answer to kin selection and group selection is probably a little bit of both in humans. Kin […]. If hyper-competitiveness was the way to the future, we would all be 8ft tall muscle bound rage […]. According to this theory, the […]. Based mostly fully […].
Based on this concept, the […]. BioScience Since , BioScience has presented readers with timely and authoritative overviews of current research in biology, accompanied by essays and discussion sections on education, public policy, history, and the conceptual underpinnings of the biological sciences.
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