Re: Article: Group selection, a theory whose time has come...again


I think its rather funny also that everybody ignored Wynne-Edwards
last book "Evolution through Group Selection" where he tried to answer
to his critics of his former book on animal dispersal. Although the
book contains a lot of the flaws that were self-evident in his first
book it also contains a lot of well articulated and compelling
evidence for group selection that has simply been glossed over and
forgotten about. The modern synthesis did a lot of good things for
evolutionary biology but creating an near dogmatic taboo against the
idea of group selection was flawed, and has stifled further research
into this potentially important factor. Whats even funnier is that
research into group selection cant even use the blanket term "group
selection" anymore, and instead had to resort to terms such as clade
sorting, lineage selection, multilevel selection, super-organism or
trait-group selection.

On another note interest in cultural group selection has increased in
recent years, mainly in humans but also in the nonhuman realm as well.

.

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