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“Group selection” is not a thing. The article hand waves this always with > some biologists still get really triggered about group selection and deny its evolu

“Group selection” is not a thing. The article hand waves this always with > some biologists still get really triggered about group selection and deny its evolutionary importance Which is dishonest at best. The vast majority of biologist have realized group selection doesn’t work as proposed. [0] What people thought was group selection was just kin selection working over time. All evolution works at the level of the gene. Genes “want” to reproduce more of themselves. And if the same gene is in a kin, then it can favor enhancing the survival of kin that carry copies of itself. At a macro level this can be misreported as group selection, but to be sure, the selection is happening at the level of the gene, and reaches at most to kin sharing genes. The article then goes on to say > The nice story I told above about the evolution of altruism could just have easily been applied to humans. Yet we do not exist in eusocial colonies, so there must be something else going on And he then talks about gene selection and the fact that bees are haplodiploidy, which is indeed the cause of the “altruism” we see. His dismissal of haplodiploidy at the end of the article is a weak argument. Just because haplodiploidy in other species doesn’t lead to eusocial groups, or that eusocial groups can occur without haplodiploidy are not sufficient arguments that dismiss the effects of haplodiploidy and kin selection favoring altruism in eusocial bees. I highly recommend people interested in these topics to read the seminal Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [1] 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

glenstein 2y ago
Agreed, it's a disappointing and discrediting detour in an article that's about a fascinating topic. As you note, this has been worked out via haplodiploidy, which doesn't require venturing into theorizing about group selection or altruism. And just to take a beat, and explain why group selection "triggers" people (in the author's wording), it's because it violates our fundamental, bedrock idea of causality which is no small thing, and anyone having a cavalier attitude about that probably doesn't belong in a room where these ideas are being deliberated. We understand physics to be causally closed, and expect "higher level" explanations to be compatible with the constraints of physics. A model example in taking causality seriously, and proceeding with extreme care and extreme caution about challenging that intuition, I think is best exhibited in Quantum Mechanics, where, after excruciatingly careful examination of data and lots of hard thinking about implications, and lots of accounting for it's almost vulgar challenge to our intuitions, do we dare offer a model that challenges our basic idea of causation. That deviation is appropriately treated as profound, by contrast with the fast and loose invocation of group selection you find in some evolutionary explanations.
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  Yes! To put a finer point on it, group selection theories don’t have a specific physical explanation for how they operate, instead veering into philosophical explanations. Ultimately natural selection must operate on the gene. Genes are the only source of information that gets passed to offspring through germ line cells in sexual reproduction or mitosis in asexual reproduction (don’t get me started on the fad of epigenetics, which is just a fancy term for standard DNA controlled embryological differentiation.) The replication of genes and the information they encode, are the physical cause of the effect of phenotypes. Group selection theorists (of which there are few) have no physical cause that allows selection to occur on the level of the group, and there’s no sound hypothesis of such that I have heard of. You’d need some physical mechanism for information flow between individuals in a group for that to be the case, and outside of kin inheritance, there’s nothing like that that exists.

glenstein 2y ago

Agreed, it's a disappointing and discrediting detour in an article that's about a fascinating topic. As you note, this has been worked out via haplodiploidy, which doesn't require venturing into theorizing about group selection or altruism. And just to take a beat, and explain why group selection "triggers" people (in the author's wording), it's because it violates our fundamental, bedrock idea of causality which is no small thing, and anyone having a cavalier attitude about that probably doesn't belong in a room where these ideas are being deliberated. We understand physics to be causally closed, and expect "higher level" explanations to be compatible with the constraints of physics. A model example in taking causality seriously, and proceeding with extreme care and extreme caution about challenging that intuition, I think is best exhibited in Quantum Mechanics, where, after excruciatingly careful examination of data and lots of hard thinking about implications, and lots of accounting for it's almost vulgar challenge to our intuitions, do we dare offer a model that challenges our basic idea of causation. That deviation is appropriately treated as profound, by contrast with the fast and loose invocation of group selection you find in some evolutionary explanations.

crazydoggers 2y ago
Yes! To put a finer point on it, group selection theories don’t have a specific physical explanation for how they operate, instead veering into philosophical explanations. Ultimately natural selection must operate on the gene. Genes are the only source of information that gets passed to offspring through germ line cells in sexual reproduction or mitosis in asexual reproduction (don’t get me started on the fad of epigenetics, which is just a fancy term for standard DNA controlled embryological differentiation.) The replication of genes and the information they encode, are the physical cause of the effect of phenotypes. Group selection theorists (of which there are few) have no physical cause that allows selection to occur on the level of the group, and there’s no sound hypothesis of such that I have heard of. You’d need some physical mechanism for information flow between individuals in a group for that to be the case, and outside of kin inheritance, there’s nothing like that that exists.