19 Facts About Group selection

Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group, instead of at the level of the individual or gene.

Richard Dawkins noted that Lorenz was a "'good of the species' man" so accustomed to group selection thinking that he did not realize his views "contravened orthodox Darwinian theory".

In 1962, group selection was used as a popular explanation for adaptation by the zoologist V C Wynne-Edwards.

Perrins, and George C Williams in his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection cast serious doubt on group selection as a major mechanism of evolution; Williams's 1971 book Group Selection assembled writings from many authors on the same theme.

Early group selection models assumed that genes acted independently, for example a gene that coded for cooperation or altruism.

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Kin Group selection between related individuals is accepted as an explanation of altruistic behavior.

One of the questions about kin Group selection is the requirement that individuals must know if other individuals are related to them, or kin recognition.

Early group selection models were flawed because they assumed that genes acted independently; but genetically based interactions among individuals are ubiquitous in group formation because genes must cooperate for the benefit of association in groups to enhance the fitness of group members.

Multilevel Group selection theory focuses on the phenotype because it looks at the levels that Group selection directly acts upon.

Wilson ties the multilevel selection theory regarding humans to another theory, gene-culture coevolution, by acknowledging that culture seems to characterize a group-level mechanism for human groups to adapt to environmental changes.

An experiment by William Muir compared egg productivity in hens, showing that a hyper-aggressive strain had been produced through individual selection, leading to many fatal attacks after only six generations; by implication, it could be argued that group selection must have been acting to prevent this in real life.

Group selection has most often been postulated in humans and, notably, eusocial Hymenoptera that make cooperation a driving force of their adaptations over time and have a unique system of inheritance involving haplodiploidy that allows the colony to function as an individual while only the queen reproduces.

Problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution.

For example, a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse.

In 1871, Darwin argued that group selection occurs when the benefits of cooperation or altruism between subpopulations are greater than the individual benefits of egotism within a subpopulation.

Fehr provides evidence of group selection taking place in humans presently with experimentation through logic games such as prisoner's dilemma, the type of thinking that humans have developed many generations ago.

Use of the Price equation to support group selection was challenged by van Veelen in 2012, arguing that it is based on invalid mathematical assumptions.

Dawkins suggests that group selection fails to make an appropriate distinction between replicators and vehicles.

Group selection isn't widely accepted by evolutionists for several reasons.