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New research by philospher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloane Wilson, presented in their 1998 book Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, indicates there may have been an additional selection component in human evolution that gave rise to cooperation and altruism, and that is a modified version of group selection. This is a volatile subject among evolutionary theorists because for the past thirty years, group selection has been next to creationism as the doctrine strict Darwinians most love to hate. ...group selection was vilified as the pap of bleeding-heart liberals who couldn't deal with the reality of "nature red in tooth and claw".

... Sober and Wilson show how "individual selection favors traits that maximize relative fitness within single groups," and that "group selection favors traits that maximize the relative fitness of groups." Of course, "altruism is maladaptive with respect to individual selection but adaptive with respect to group selection." Therefore, they conclude, "altruism is can evolve if the process of group selection is sufficiently strong."

Chapter 7, page 165 in hardback

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Primary and Secondary Behaviours

Sober and Wilson explain how they perceive group level adaptations to work by looking at different cultural norms, and describe how they affect the fitness of both the group and individual. These descriptions can be thought of as primary and secondary behaviours.

Sober and Wilson describe a primary behaviour as a behaviour that: “…increases the fitness of the group and decreases the relative fitness of the (individual) within the group.” (pg. 143). Secondary behaviours are reward and punishment behaviours that others confer on the individual exhibiting the primary behaviour.

Two examples used to illustrate the difference between the two behaviours are as follows:

1) It has been observed in different hunter-gatherer societies, that the meat collected by hunters is equally distributed between members of the group, and that there is no apparent reward for the hunters or their families for this task. The primary behaviour in this case is seen as the hunting and sharing of food equally among the group, where the hunter and their relatives do not benefit in any extra way from this behaviour. Furthermore the hunter has the fitness costs of the time and energy expended in doing the hunting. However, the rule that the meat is equally shared has not been initiated by the hunters, but is a social rule that is enforced on them, and if they do not conform to this rule they are subject to being punished. This then, would be the secondary behaviour.

2) The second example Sober and Wilson describe involves a rule from 13th Century Spanish Jewish Society. In this society males get black marks next to their names if they do not pay their taxes, which can seriously hurt their marriage prospects. In this case, the primary behaviour is paying the taxes (that is, giving money to the group) and the secondary behaviour is the punishment that the tax-avoider receives for not complying to this law.

What Sober and Wilson are attempting to illustrate with these examples, is that the secondary behaviour which enforces that these rules promotes the fitness of the group as a whole. Depending on the social laws of different societies, the fitness level of each given group will be different, in a way that could not occur at the individual level, and that complies with the condition outlined above that Sober and Wilson believe to show adaptation occurring at a group level.

I find their argument for the existence of group adaptations to be problematic for a number of reasons.

In the first section of this essay where Williams’ criteria for determining what constituted an adaptation was presented, it was mentioned that parsimony was a critical issue to take into account when deciding at what level an adaptation was taking place. If a behaviour could be explained on one level, then it was superfluous – and spurious– to argue that a higher level of explanation was warranted. I can think of a number of alternative explanations that can account for these scenarios perfectly well at an individual level of selection.

For instance, in the hunter gatherer example there are many ways for a hunter and his related fitness to be increased other than by securing more food. For example, hunters may be seen as more attractive to women as they may be better protectors and providers, and may have fitness advantages in this respect. They may be given status in the community that allows them many other benefits from their peers. It is also still possible that the benefit is kin related, as it is reasonable to imagine groups in the Pleistoocene would mainly be comprised of extended families, and thus feeding the group would be equated with increasing fitness of relatives regardless.

There are explanations that are also apparent at an individual level for the Jewish society example. Jeopardizing a man’s chances at marriage is directly targeting his personal reproductive fitness. Evolutionary psychologists subscribe to the view that because females are saddled with a nine month gestation period and several years nurturing afterwards, that they would have evolved a preference for mates that could protect and provide for them. So by penalising males who don’t pay their taxes in this way, law enforcers are also advertising that these males are possibly miserly, which the family of any prospective wife would look very poorly on.

Furthermore, both these groups do not fall within structures that lack hierarchy or motivation by the enforcers of these secondary behaviours. People who make the law have their own motivations for such laws, both for the welfare of the group, and to keep conflicting interests of their constituents from causing them to lose their status and power.

Finally I fail to understand how Sober and Wilson can argue that group selection facilitates altruistic behaviour, and present an explanation that necessitates the use of a reward and punishment system. If altruism is a behaviour that, despite costs to the individual, can evolve naturally because it increases the fitness of the group as a whole, why does the individual have to be kept from doing something that comes more “naturally” to them? Why force hunters to share meat equally if they’re naturally going to do this? Why be worried that people are not going to pay their taxes if they are already predisposed to do so? The individual psychological adaptations I’ve outlined in the last point are purported to be universal among all humans, and it appears far more parsimonious to me that more “natural” behaviours of individuals are regulated in order to stabilise groups of people living together; the reward/punishment system is in place as reaction to behaviours that are adaptations, not as an adaptation in and of itself. I do agree that society can play a huge role in controlling behaviours of individuals for the welfare of the group (or the people in power), but I don’t believe this role has anything to do with evolved adaptations at the group selection level.

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the primary unit of selection is the gene, as expressed in an individual body

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The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.