This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone since Wilson has become a supporter of group selection and—even more egregious—a critic of kin selection. Dawkins is a big fan of gene centric adaptation so group selection is heresy. Dawkins thinks that Hamilton's discovery of kin selection ranks right up there with Newton and Darwin, so anyone who casts doubt on kin selection is also a heretic.
I'm not an expert on the details of this debate although my instinct is to think that kin selection is vastly overblown1 and there's nothing obviously wrong with the concepts of group selection or species sorting. However, Dawkins mentions something that raises some important questions about evolution and I wonder what people think.
Read more »
No comments:
Post a Comment