PhilGoetz comments on Group selection update - Less Wrong
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I've just spent 2 hours sorting through various references to group selection to try to figure out whether your distinction is correct. As Samir Okasha writes, "The group selection debate has been characterised by perennial disagreements over concepts and terminology, as well as empirical fact."
So far, Stephen J. Gould uses this group/species distinction, and almost everyone else rejects it. The more common usage is given in the BioTech Life Science Dictionary:
(Gould uses the term interdemic selection, but says it is synonymous with group selection, and distinguishes it from species selection.)
Eliezer's post talked about species selection. David Wilson's 2009 blog series on group selection, Truth & Reconciliation (linked to in the post), says nothing about any distinction between "group selection" and "species selection"; and the endangered bird species example of group selection in part 18 (p. 39) is species selection. Read the Wikipedia entry on group selection - everything that it says applies to species selection. All of the arguments presented against group selection apply equally to species selection. Some of the instances of group selection it provides are species selection. It never draws any distinction between group selection and species selection.
Many examples in various sources of group selection do not have between-group migration, and do have extinction of groups. For example, the ant colonies that EO Wilson talks about - there is AFAIK no gene transfer between ant colonies, since ants can't migrate from one colony to another. On the Wikipedia page on group selection, it includes as examples viruses in rabbits, where selection occurs at the level of a single rabbit, and no gene transfer occurs between different infected rabbits.The Rauch et al analysis referred to is a similar case. So is the "brain worm" example.
Many attacks on group selection, including Williams' Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966), speak in general terms about selection at higher levels indiscriminately, not singling out group vs. species selection. Here is what Richard Dawkins writes when attacking group selection in The Selfish Gene:
Here is a quote from Samir Okasha (2005), Maynard Smith on the levels of selection question:
So, George Williams, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, and David Wilson all agree that group selection includes species selection.
Maynard Smith's haystack model, which was the original theoretical basis for rejecting group selection (and is fatally flawed; see p. 17 of the David Wilson T&R essay), does not work on species selection. The mathematical model that Eliezer used does not apply to species selection (nor to interdemic selection in general). Yet they use the phrase "group selection". So there is some basis for considering group selection to be synonymous with interdemic selection; but that basis appears to be the carelessness of earlier theorists.
The group-selection-bashing I've witnessed for decades has always taken the line that all group selection, including species selection, is equally bad. I've seen many people object to the invocation of group selection, and I've never noticed any of them draw a distinction between interdemic and species selection.
Please cite a reference for your usage of the terms.
Wikipedia gives an acceptable definition:
In the context of biology or ecology, a "population" is defined as being a collection of organisms of the same species:
For examples of group selection critics being more sympathetic towards species selection, see Dawkins, T.E.P., page 101 onwards and Mark Ridley's evolution textbook:
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Group_selection_.asp
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Species_selection.asp
For a different definition, consider:
That wasn't my greatest reply ever - I was in a rush. Yes, Dawkins included species in your quote. And Williams (1966) defined the term "group" in a way that didn't explicitly rule out species. So, I agree that some prominent folks have included species under the group selection umbrella at least once.
However, at least 90% of group selection models deal with sexual species. If you claim group selection exists, and then exhibit species selection to prove it, an awful lot of evolutionary biologists are going to say: "well, that's just species selection - we already know about that".
Interdemic selection has a problem not found in species selection - namely gene flow typically tends to quickly destroy variation between groups. It is that that effect that Maynard-Smith modelled in the material you cite - and it is interdemic selection which is the most controversial.
A species is a collection of organisms of the same species.
A family is a collection of organisms of the same species (although I have my doubts about that aunt...)
Your point is not clear to me.
If you define a species as the set of all such organisms, then a "population" is a subset of that set.
And a set is a subset of itself.
I don't really see where you are going with this. Yes, all the members of a species could qualify as being a "population" - expecially if they all lived in the same place.
However, that doesn't make species selection into a special case of group selection under the Wikipedia definition.
Richard Dawkins wrote an obituary for George Williams in the Oct. 1 Science, in which he said that Williams developed the idea of "clade selection" which Dawkins calls important. Clade selection is the idea that selection can operate on an entire clade.
The article this post is about a clade. It's clade selection in that the entire clade has benefitted from SI. Is it also species selection, because entire species are selected against when they develop SC? I think so.
In either case, I think it's hypocritical of Dawkins to call group selection "loose, intellectually shoddy.. muddled", and in the same article praise clade selection.
Rather than calling Dawkins a hypocrite, don't you think it would be more appropriate to simply note that Dawkins seems to be another person who doesn't agree with you that clade selection (and hence species selection) is just one form of group selection?
Obituary: George C. Williams (1926–2010) - By RICHARD DAWKINS