Group Selection
- LAST REVIEWED: 17 August 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 April 2018
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199941728-0101
- LAST REVIEWED: 17 August 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 April 2018
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199941728-0101
Introduction
The basic idea of group selection theory is that the logic of natural selection acting at the level of individual organisms can also be applied to the level of whole groups of organisms. Exactly what this means and whether it is a useful way of thinking about the biological world remains very controversial. Indeed, the development of the group selection literature often appears to have been driven as much by confusion and misstep as it has by informed reasoning. Although careful and considered foundations were laid in the 19th century by Charles Darwin, his contributions to the theory of group—or multilevel—selection were largely ignored and, in the 20th century, gave way to a naïve view that ordinary natural selection leads inevitably to adaptation for the good of the species as a whole. Since the 1960s, progress has proceeded in fits and starts, with a gradual consensus building that adaptation at the level of whole populations requires that selection has been acting at a between-population level and that population-level adaptation tends to be eroded by the action of within-population selection. This development in understanding has led to an interest in conceptualizing and quantifying the action of selection at the between-group and within=group levels in a range of theoretical and empirical scenarios. However, no consensus has emerged as to how group selection and related concepts are to be formally defined. Accordingly, the theoretical literature is characterized by repeated returns to first principles and repeated reinventing of the wheel, rather than steady, cumulative and collaborative progress. And this failure of theory has led to an empirical literature that is very patchy, with some neat studies in the laboratory and in the field being motivated and conducted within a multilevel selection framework but with little sustained progress through long-term interplay of theoretical and empirical research. As a research program, group selection has certainly enjoyed much less success than its competitor—the theory of kin selection—which appears to describe exactly the same phenomena in an alternative but exactly equivalent mathematical and conceptual language and has been shown to have enormous scientific utility in relation to biological topics as diverse as sex ratios, parasite virulence, and the evolution of altruism. But group selection does logically appear to provide a superior conceptual framework for understanding the evolution of group-level adaptation and so-called “major transitions in individuality” (e.g., from unicells to multicellular animals to eusocial insect “superorganisms”), and perhaps also the evolution of human culture, which, if it is Darwinian at all, may be best conceptualized as being a property of social groups and institutions than of individual persons. Moreover, group selection is of strong interest to philosophers and historians of science, as well as to biologists of a philosophical and historical bent.
General Overviews
The literature on group selection has been inordinately focused on simply establishing what group selection is and whether it plays any meaningful role in the natural world. Multiple overviews have been published over the last sixty years, often in book form but also as influential review papers.
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Article
- Adaptation
- Adaptive Radiation
- Altruism
- Ancient DNA
- Behavioral Ecology
- Canalization and Robustness
- Cancer, Evolutionary Processes in
- Character Displacement
- Coevolution
- Cognition, Evolution of
- Constraints, Evolutionary
- Contemporary Evolution
- Convergent Evolution
- Cooperation and Conflict: Microbes to Humans
- Cooperative Breeding in Insects and Vertebrates
- Creationism
- Cryptic Female Choice
- Darwin, Charles
- Darwinism
- Disease Virulence, Evolution of
- Diversification, Diversity-Dependent
- Ecological Speciation
- Endosymbiosis
- Epigenetics and Behavior
- Epistasis and Evolution
- Eusocial Insects as a Model for Understanding Altruism, Co...
- Eusociality
- Evidence of Evolution, The
- Evolution
- Evolution and Development: Genes and Mutations Underlying ...
- Evolution and Development of Individual Behavioral Variati...
- Evolution, Cultural
- Evolution of Animal Mating Systems
- Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance
- Evolution of New Genes
- Evolution of Plant Mating Systems
- Evolution of Specialization
- Evolutionary Biology of Aging
- Evolutionary Biomechanics
- Evolutionary Computation
- Evolutionary Developmental Biology
- Evolutionary Ecology of Communities
- Experimental Evolution
- Extinction
- Field Studies of Natural Selection
- Fossils
- Founder Effect Speciation
- Frequency-Dependent Selection
- Fungi, Evolution of
- Gene Duplication
- Gene Expression, Evolution of
- Gene Flow
- Genetics, Ecological
- Genome Evolution
- Geographic Variation
- Gradualism
- Group Selection
- Heterochrony
- Heterozygosity
- History of Evolutionary Thought, 1860–1925
- History of Evolutionary Thought before Darwin
- History of Evolutionary Thought Since 1930
- Human Behavioral Ecology
- Human Evolution
- Hybrid Speciation
- Hybrid Zones
- Identifying the Genomic Basis Underlying Phenotypic Variat...
- Inbreeding and Inbreeding Depression
- Inclusive Fitness
- Innovation, Evolutionary
- Islands as Evolutionary Laboratories
- Kin Selection
- Land Plants, Evolution of
- Landscape Genetics
- Landscapes, Adaptive
- Language, Evolution of
- Latitudinal Diversity Gradient, The
- Macroevolution
- Macroevolutionary Rates
- Male-Male Competition
- Mass Extinction
- Mate Choice
- Maternal Effects
- Medicine, Evolutionary
- Meiotic Drive
- Mimicry
- Modern Synthesis, The
- Molecular Clocks
- Molecular Phylogenetics
- Mutation Rate and Spectrum
- Mutualism, Evolution of
- Natural Selection in Human Populations
- Natural Selection in the Genome, Detecting
- Neutral Theory
- New Zealand, Evolutionary Biogeography of
- Niche Construction
- Niche Evolution
- Non-Human Animals, Cultural Evolution in
- Origin and Early Evolution of Animals
- Origin of Eukaryotes
- Origin of Life, The
- Paradox of Sex
- Parental Care, Evolution of
- Parthenogenesis
- Personality Differences, Evolution of
- Phenotypic Plasticity
- Phylogenetic Comparative Methods and Tests of Macroevoluti...
- Phylogenetic Trees, Interpretation of
- Phylogeography
- Polyploid Speciation
- Population Genetics
- Population Structure
- Post-Copulatory Sexual Selection
- Psychology, Evolutionary
- Punctuated Equilibria
- Quantitative Genetic Variation and Heritability
- Reaction Norms, Evolution of
- Reinforcement
- Reproductive Proteins, Evolution of
- Selection, Directional
- Selection, Disruptive
- Selection Gradients
- Selection, Natural
- Selection, Sexual
- Selfish Genes
- Sequential Speciation and Cascading Divergence
- Sexual Conflict
- Sexual Selection and Speciation
- Sexual Size Dimorphism
- Speciation
- Speciation Genetics and Genomics
- Speciation, Geography of
- Speciation, Sympatric
- Species Concepts
- Species Delimitation
- Sperm Competition
- Stasis
- Systems Biology
- Taxonomy and Classification
- Tetrapod Evolution
- The Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology
- Theory, Coalescent
- Trends, Evolutionary
- Wallace, Alfred Russel