1. Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans

Comment #220050 by windy on July 28, 2008 at 2:54 am

The recent Scientific American has a related piece of news:

"Researchers led by William Hughes of the University of Leeds in England say they have the first clear evidence that supports kin selection, rather than group selection, in eusociality."

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=monogamy-is-responsible-for-the-evolution-of-bees

The original article was published already in May. It's a pity that Wilson's views get so much more publicity than recent research in the subject.

2. Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans

Comment #212875 by windy on July 17, 2008 at 7:35 pm

It's rather painful to see Wilson argue that "...deep in their heart everyone working on social insects is aware that the selection that created them is multilevel selection". Come on!

Everytime I dig into the Selfish Gene v Group Selection argument it strikes me it is one of those non-argruments made into a major controvsery.

You're right. Kin selection and group selection are the same process, or one is the subset of another, depending on who you ask. I think the former is right and also that kin selection/inclusive fitness is generally a more useful way of thinking about things.

Foster et al wrote in response to Wilson and others:

...it has long been known that group selection cannot explain the strong altruism of insect workers without invoking greater between-group genetic variance than can be achieved through random assortment [refs]. And which ever way you slice it, this between-group variance means that group members are related

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2006.08.010

Thus you could say that group selection "reduces" to kin selection, at least all the models examined so far.

3. The Group Delusion

Comment #111026 by windy on January 13, 2008 at 10:56 am

Blake Stacey wrote:

A physicist with an interest in biology and some familiarity with the theoretical literature says, "I've created this model and made a computer simulation which shows such-and-such an effect happening. I think it counts as altruism. Does this show up in biology anywhere?"

If you are referring to the models of Bar-Yam and others, unfortunately they haven't quite understood the gene-centered models they want to replace.

http://necsi.org/projects/evolecol/selfishgene.html

In the current issue of Advances in Complex Systems (February-April), Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute and an expert on the application of mathematical analysis to complex systems, contends that the selfish-gene theory of evolution is fatally flawed.

If his mathematical proof gains general acceptance, it will shut the door on controversial "gene-centered" views of evolution.

Bar-Yam, in the upcoming article, proves that the "selfish gene" approach is not valid in the general case. He demonstrates that the gene-centered view, expressed in mathematical form, is only an approximation of the dynamics actually at work. And this approximation does not always work. Specifically, it breaks down when a process called symmetry breaking enters the picture.

This refers to an article he wrote in -99, but I am not aware that his views have radically changed. In that article (available online), he claims that gene-centered evolution requires genes to mix perfectly as in Dawkins' "rowers analogy", and thus gene selection can't work when this condition is not fulfilled. But is it true? Consider kin selection as an example. For the rowers analogy to represent kin selection, we have to add substantial qualifiers. Let's say that boats (=individuals) occasionally offer to tow other boats, although this slows down the first boat (=altruism). We also need some way of assuring that boats are more likely to help along boats filled with related rowers (=alleles). This can be accomplished by spatial structure (proximity) or kin recognition. So, rather than relying on perfect mixing, kin selection implicitly incorporates "symmetry breaking"!

It might be worth writing a response to this article, but since it's almost 10 years old, it seems a bit silly to submit a comment to the journal. Unfortunately this discussion was on forum where most biologists don't venture (I think), and thus these misconceptions have gone unchallenged! Werfel and Bar-Yam's 2004 PNAS article on the evolution of reproductive restraint might partly rely on the same sort of misconceptions, but there the background assumptions aren't stated as clearly, so it's harder to criticize them. (The authors are not satisfied with either kin-selection or Wilsonian group selection, and instead root for Wynne-Edwards, but I'll skip the details of their model for now)