Seleccion De Grupo

C O M M E N TA RY
doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01290.x

EIGHT CRITICISMS NOT TO MAKE ABOUT
GROUP SELECTION
Omar Tonsi Eldakar1,2,3 and David Sloan Wilson2,4,5
1

Center for Insect Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 85721

2

These authors contributed equally to this work

3

E-mail: oeldakar@gmail.com

4

Department of Biological Sciences, Binghamton University,Binghamton, New York, 13902

5

Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, 13902

Received February 20, 2011
Accepted February 28, 2011
Group selection, which was once widely rejected as a significant evolutionary force, is now accepted by all who seriously study
the subject. There is still widespread confusion about group selection, however, not only amongstudents and the general public,
but among professional evolutionists who do not directly study the subject. We list eight criticisms that are frequently invoked
against group selection, which can be permanently laid to rest based upon current knowledge. Experts will always find something
to critique about group selection, as for any important subject, but these eight criticisms are not amongthem. Laying them to rest
will enable authors to openly use the term group selection without being handicapped during the review process.
KEY WORDS:

Group selection, multilevel selection, peer review process.

“Please remove all references to group selection. . . significant
or not, group selection is not going on here.”
“It is all very well to look at success within and between groups,
butcan you really extrapolate this to group selection?”
“What the authors show is not group selection, but rather that
. . . mating success depends on the social environment”
“ This is a controversial topic, worthy of a mention, but not
worthy of the extended discussion, because it is largely lacking
in both formal theory and empirical support to justify it.”
“I am not sure how this behaviorcan be maintained under
a group selection scenario unless there is no dispersal and
populations frequently go extinct.”
–anonymous reviews of manuscripts framed explicitly in terms
of group selection

Group selection is the evolution of traits based on the differential survival and productivity of groups. It was first proposed by
Darwin (1871), who observed that social adaptations frequentlyare not locally advantageous. The paradigmatic example is altruism, which is good for the group but vulnerable to more selfish
behaviors within the group. How can a behavior evolve in the

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C 2011 The Author(s). Evolution
Evolution 65-6: 1523–1526

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total population when it is selectively disadvantageous within
each and every group? Only if it is selectively advantageous at
alarger scale. Groups with more altruists robustly outcompete
groups with more selfish individuals, which can counterbalance
the selective disadvantage of altruism within groups. Sober (2011)
has recently cataloged Darwin’s thoughts on group selection in
the entire corpus of his work.
Group selection appeared to be authoritatively rejected in
the 1960s, as every student of evolutionary biologyknows. The
verdict was that group selection is theoretically possible but that in
reality, selection within groups is almost invariably stronger than
selection among groups. As George C. Williams (1966, p. 93) put
it in Adaptation and Natural Selection, “group-related adaptations
do not, in fact, exist.” Following the rejection of group selection,
what looked like altruism was explained interms of individual
or genetic self-interest, based on theoretical frameworks such as
inclusive fitness theory, evolutionary game theory and selfish gene
theory (reviewed by Sober and Wilson 1998).
All of these theoretical frameworks were regarded as alternatives to group selection until George Price convinced W.D.
Hamilton that Darwin’s explanation was embedded in inclusive

2011 The...