Gulliver's further travels: the necessity and difficulty of a hierarchical theory of selection

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
S J Gould

Abstract

For principled and substantially philosophical reasons, based largely on his reform of natural history by inverting the Paleyan notion of overarching and purposeful beneficence in the construction of organisms, Darwin built his theory of selection at the single causal level of individual bodies engaged in unconscious (and metaphorical) struggle for their own reproductive success. But the central logic of the theory allows selection to work effectively on entities at several levels of a genealogical hierarchy, provided that they embody a set of requisite features for defining evolutionary individuality. Genes, cell lineages, demes, species, and clades-as well as Darwin's favoured organisms-embody these requisite features in enough cases to form important levels of selection in the history of life. R. A. Fisher explicitly recognized the unassailable logic of species selection, but denied that thsi real process could be important in evolution because, compared with the production of new organisms within a species, the origin of new species is so rare, and the number of species within most clades so low. I review this and other classical arguments against higher-level selection, and conclude (in the first part of this paper) that t...Continue Reading

References

Sep 21, 1979·Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character·S J Gould, R C Lewontin
Apr 17, 1980·Nature·W F Doolittle, C Sapienza
Apr 17, 1980·Nature·L E Orgel, F H Crick
Nov 18, 1993·Nature·S J Gould, N Eldredge

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Citations

Dec 28, 1999·Trends in Cell Biology·W F Doolittle
Mar 16, 2007·Virology Journal·Philip Serwer
Jun 5, 2003·The American Naturalist·Thomas J Webb, Kevin J Gaston
Oct 1, 2015·Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere : the Journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life·Srdja Janković, Milan M Ćirković
Feb 14, 2009·International Journal of Dental Hygiene·S J CobbanL Keenan
Feb 22, 2017·Trends in Ecology & Evolution·Marjorie G WeberBlake Matthews
May 1, 2001·Physical Review Letters·M LässigA Valleriani
May 18, 2021·Evolution; International Journal of Organic Evolution·Zachary B HancockGideon S Bradburd
Jun 26, 1999·Science·D Jablonski
Feb 16, 2002·Science·Katherine J Willis, Robert J Whittaker

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