razib comments on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 September 2007 08:05PM

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Comment author: razib 16 September 2007 05:49:56AM 0 points [-]

This is an ancient and thoroughly discredited idea. See George Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection."

i am generally skeptical of group selectionist arguments, but we are probably on the cusp of a renaissance in this area. it will be spearheaded by e.o. wilson, who has always been a "believer," but who now believes that group selection (or at least multi-level selection) has the empirical and analytical firepower to make a comeback. i am cautiously skeptical, but in the interests of honesty i think that "ancient and thoroughly discredited" is probably a better description for group selection circa 1995 than 2007. most evolutionary biologists are probably pretty skeptical of group selectionist arguments, but in large part it is because the models presented (which tend to avoid the pitfalls of the earlier arguments) are hard to test and seem analytically intractable beyond the simplest formulations.