= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
nhamann comments on Group selection update - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (58)
The cited article is about species selection - but this post claims to be about group selection.
As biologists often use the terms, group selection and species selection are quite different concepts.
The standard objection to group selection - which is that gene transfer due to between-group migration and recombination usually swamps the effect of between-group selection - doesn't apply to selection between species - because there is little or no gene transfer between species.
As a result, species selection isn't very controversial - compared to group selection.
Group selection has been demonstrated in the lab (Wade's flour beetles, etc) - but there is still some controversy over its significance in nature.
Yes, species are groups - but the actual area where there is a controversy is over selection between groups that are within sexual species. Selection between species is not relevant to this.
However, I agree that articles like this make EY look as though he has wandered into an unfamiliar area - which he doesn't know as much about as he thinks he does.
Wikipedia seems to contradict this: "It remains controversial among biologists whether selection can operate at and above the level of species."
I did a quick search on Google and found a paper from 2010 which claims that "Species selection as a potential driver of macroevolutionary trends has been relegated to a largely philosophical position in modern evolutionary biology."
I'm not very familiar with biology, but at a glance it looks like species selection is pretty controversial.
That seems to be a rather confused way of putting it. Or course selection operates between species. The issue is whether it results in very much in the way of species-level adaptations.
Did you read the whole abstract? They say "species selection is an important process":
I did read the whole abstract: the author admits that species selection is controversial in modern evolutionary biology, and in the rest of the paper argues that this should not be the case. The point of my previous comment was not whether species selection should or should not be recognized as important, because I do not know. It was a question concerning how well-accepted species selection is amongst biologists.