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Published online 27 May 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.516
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The nail in the coffin for group selection?
Benefits to an individual and its family may be enough to account for altruistic behaviour.
A model that examines the behaviour of parasites infecting their hosts renders the evolutionary paradigm of group selection unnecessary, say scientists in Canada and the United Kingdom1.
Why organisms display behaviours or other adaptations that aren't directly beneficial to them is a question that has intrigued biologists and caused conflict between different schools of thought for generations.
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RE: The nail in the coffin for group selection? -- Not yet, or at best not by the studies as argued by Geoff Wild, et al, herein above; but it's a beginning for its detractors to examine into such an anthropomorphic "group selection" theory from hereon more scientifically and philosophically. As most biologists know: Group selection or kin selection or altruism has since the 1960s been misconceived by its proponents (mostly neo-Darwinists or Darwinian reductionists) as "the gene as the ultimate unit of adaptation;" or the "genetic selectionism" that has had been so fantasized, reduced, and popularized by the Oxford armchair-reductionist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller book "The Selfish Gene" as the mindless "genetic replicator." Although recently David Sloan Wilson and the Harvard myrmecologist E O Wilson have been trying to redefine the group theory as the "selection and adaptation at multiple levels: traits [that] can confer benefits to the individual, the family, the group or the society," this new definition of the "multilevel altruism" is still nonspecific, and grossly, anthropocentric. This "anthropomorphism" in organism-behaviorism and the "misinterpretation of animal behaviorisms and selectionisms" must have had been influenced by the prolific writings of E O Wilson's that have had been "anthropomorphizing" his studies of "ant colonies" as "human societies" especially exemplified in one of his most controversial and "scientistic" books "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis" since 1975. Scientifically, altruism in the group theory of organisms (if there is such an anthropomorphic trait in organisms) will have to be reexamined from and tested at each biological, biochemical, neurological, and physiological levels; and not just at the individual organism-environment-interaction levels, such as those in parasitology or myrmecology as discussed above. -- Best wishes, Mong 5/29/9usct2:58p; author "Decoding Scientism" and "Consciousness & the Subconscious" (works in progress since July 2007), "Gods, Genes, Conscience" (2006: http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0595379907 ) and "Gods, Genes, Conscience: Global Dialogues Now" (blogging avidly since 2006: http://www2.blogger.com/profile/18303146609950569778 ).