Ayelet Shavit & Roberta L. Millstein, 2008. Group selection is dead! Long live group selection. BioScience 58(7):574-575. FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS: We live in interesting times. Two well-known biologists—E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins—and some of their well-known colleagues, who used to employ broadly similar selection models, now deeply disagree over the role of group selection in the evolution of eusociality (or so we will argue). Yet they describe their models as interchangeable. As philosophers of biology, we wonder whether there is substantial (i.e., empirical) disagreement here at all, and, if there is, what is this disagreement about?
We argue that a substantial disagreement over the processes that caused eusociality best explains this debate, yet the common practice of using overarching definitions for “group selection” and “kin selection” renders empirical differences difficult to detect. We suggest Michael J. Wade’s use of these terms as a basis for models that reveal different selection processes. Wade’s models predict different outcomes for different processes and thus can be tested.
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STEPHAN PICKERING / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham
The Dinosaur Fractals Project
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Santa Cruz, California 95062-4250
stephanpickering@ cs.com
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theropod research summarized: < www.dinodata. net > see PICKERING under their
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