he reproductive division of eusocial animals into breeding and non-breeding individuals has mystified biologists as far back as Charles Darwin. Why would some individuals give up their ability to procreate for the sake of others? In simple Darwinian terms, it doesn’t appear to make sense because a non-breeder would, by definition, not leave any offspring behind to pass on the non-breeding trait.

ant wrote:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 49956.html

[Wilson] has once again poked a stick into the wasps’ nest of academia by publicly denouncing Hamilton’s inclusive fitness and the concept of kin selection.

“It was a mistake and I went along with it to begin with. But it’s finished. It’s over,” Wilson tells me, with a flick of his hand.

Another problem with the bundling of human altruism, insect eusociality, and group selection is that insect eusociality itself is not, according to most biologists other than Wilson, explicable by group selection. But let's provisionally grant one part of the association for the sake of the empirical tests. The gene-centered explanation of eusociality depends on the relatedness of sterile workers and soldiers to a small number of queens who are capable of passing along their genes, and of course that reproductive system is absent from human groups. Nonetheless, according to this argument, humans are like bees in contributing to the welfare of their community. Since the gene-centered theory of insect eusociality cannot apply to humans, perhaps it is unnecessary to explain bees either. In that case, the most parsimonious theory would explain both human altruism and insect eusociality with group selection.

So for the time being we can ask, is human psychology really similar to the psychology of bees? When a bee suicidally stings an invader, presumably she does so as a primary motive, as natural as feeding on nectar or seeking a comfortable temperature. But do humans instinctively volunteer to blow themselves up or advance into machine-gun fire, as they would if they had been selected with group-beneficial adaptations? My reading of the study of cooperation by psychologists and anthropologists, and of the study of group competition by historians and political scientists, suggest that in fact human are nothing like bees.

The huge literature on the evolution of cooperation in humans has done quite well by applying the two gene-level explanations for altruism from evolutionary biology, nepotism and reciprocity, each with a few twists entailed by the complexity of human cognition.

While logically and theoretically possible, when group selection does work it can be shown to be equivalent to gene-level selection, usually acting through interactions between individuals. It is thus more fruitfully modeled—and explained—by gene- and individual-centered explanations that often involve “inclusive fitness”

It makes zero sense in old paradigmatic theory for a gene carrier to sacrifice their fertility for "the good" of the collective.