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I'm not sure I understand the objections to group selection. It seems to me rather obvious that if a member of a group has traits which undermine the stability and coherence of the group, the whole group will be penalized and their genes scrapped. A group with individuals who benefit the group will benefit, giving all the individuals in the group a selective advantage. Humans are social animals, and we clearly have evolved a lot of traits that strengthen tribal bonds and enable teamwork, even to the point where modern tribalism threatens the survival of our, and other, species. Clearly individuals are part of a mesh, and the actions of one affect the others, with various symmetrical and asymmetrical benefits/penalties for the group.

Michael

I'm not sure what you mean by "no mechanism"... Individual selection would be part of a matrix whenever the individual's traits affect the survival chances of others in the group. It would make no sense (that I can think of) to consider individual selection as an isolated event, if reproduction depends to any degree on social status or the success of a tribe in warfare (themselves linked...those best at war achieve high status and have more access to mates, perhaps even multiple mates).

If, say, a rock star gets his genes into the pants of several dozen women, his genes have an advantage...but in order to become a rock star, he must have some traits that the tribe promotes...in that case it is not prowess in battle that attracts a mate, but "charisma" which might be a sort of strange attractor involving feedback between performer and audience, amplified by the genetic (or memetic) traits of the person on stage. Being such an attractor would put one in a position to have a far greater influence on the memes and genes of a tribe, amplifying his traits in a way not available to Joe Paycheck. I'd like to hear Howard's views on this thread...

It would (it seems to me) be impossible to isolate the individual's reproduction from his status in the group. Clearly success in the human mating game depends on status, there's no way for the individual's success at reproducing his genes to be separated from the cultural matrix, since the individual and group influence one another reciprocally. When the individual not only depends on the tribe for status (influencing his chances of reproduction) but has an effect on the ability of the tribe to form war or hunting packs, then the "weak link" would naturally impact the reproductive success of others in the tribe. One's genes represent information which would make no sense if the cultural matrix were not considered...the information in the individual's DNA could not be derived without interaction with the culture (without the culture, the environment would exert totaly different selection pressures). In fact, I don't see how you could isolate any organism from the organisms which impact its environment, chances of reproducing, food supply, etc. It's all a system, the individuals interact in unfathomably deep ways, and there is just no way I can see to talk about "individual" rather than group selection. Selection IS group selection, any time the group has any sort of influence on the survival or reproductive success of the individual.

I don't see a need for a special mechanism, I would consider group selection the natural outcome of individual selection. The difference would be in the inclusion of one's gene-mates in one's environment, whereas a solitary species would interact more with members of other species and not have its reproductive chances determined to the same degree by its relatives (although he might lose out to a cousin whose sperm are faster, I suppose). The feedback would tie individual and group together in the way the weather is not just a collection of independent drops of water or vectors of air flow, but is an interaction between the properties of zillions of water and air molecules, none of which contains the weather in itself, yet influences the weather as much as any other drop or breeze does.

Michael