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Units of Selection and the Structure of the Multi-Level Genome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2022

William C. Wimsatt
William C. Wimsatt*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Committee on Conceptual Foundations of Science and Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago
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Extract

The dominant view among evolutionary biologists today is that the gene is the only unit of selection. According to this view, larger units are too unstable in evolutionary time to act as units of selection. Chromosomes are broken up by sexual recombination. At the level of the individual organism, phenotypes pass on genes, but (it is claimed!) last themselves only one generation. Genotypes of individuals, collections of chromosomes, are rearranged by Mendelian independent assortment in sexual reproduction and so also persist for only one generation. Groups of individuals are still more ephemeral, or so we are told.

All of these points are argued at length by George C. Williams in his book Adaptation and Natural Selection which, since its publication in 1966, has been the watershed for the rise to dominance of this reductionistic vision of evolutionary theory.

Type
Part II. Unity of Science— Group Selection and Sociobiology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 122 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

The debts I owe for this paper are similar to those for my earlier paper, on the topic (1980b). Intellectually the viewpoints expressed here owe most to Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, and more recently to Michael Wade. To James Crow and to Russ Lande, I owe special debts of thanks, for each prevented me Cat places indicated in the text) from making major errors. Unfortunately, the errors avoided in this paper (my prior belief that most population geneticists believed that most variance in fitness is additive), is mistakenly attributed to Crow in 1980b, p. 237. I here admit my error, and thank him for his many useful comments on the topic, most of which have been incorporated in the present discussion. Others whose comments on the earlier paper.were very useful to me in writing this one include James Griesemer, Jack Hirshleifer, David Hull, Marcy Lawton, Richard Michod, Bob Richardson, and Elliott Sober. Hull, Sober and I may not be in complete agreement, tut the at least approximate consilience of our views (relative to those of the “reductionistic opposition“) has been a productive spur to further work to reconcile our differences. Finally, the vast majority of this work was done with support from the National Science Foundation, under grant NSF-S0C78-07310. I thank them for this generous support. Frances LaDuke has again beautifully typed this paper.

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