ArticleJournal of evolutionary biology2015
The genetical theory of multilevel selection.
Article in Journal of evolutionary biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Beyond formal equivalence: research questions and explanatory function in group and multilevel selection theory.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Pooled it
- The selfish ribosome.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- The selfish ribosome.ArXiv · 2026Article
- Fraternal cooperation of hierarchical cancer parallels metazoan multicellularity and eusociality.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Multilevel Selection in the Margins: A Review of Its Representation in Undergraduate Biology Textbooks.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Do duplication-inducing elements 'cooperate' with genes in evolutionary arms races? A case study on cereal crop pathogenesis.BMC plant biology · 2025Article
- Ronald Fisher and group selection.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- A generalized Price equation for fuzzy set-mappings.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2025Article
- Multilevel selection on individual and group social behaviour in the wild.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Shifting the Level of Selection in Science.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- A systematic framework for understanding the microbiome in human health and disease: from basic principles to clinical translation.Signal transduction and targeted therapy · 2024Review
- Evolution of transmissible cancers: An adaptive, plastic strategy of selfish genetic elements?iScience · 2024Review
- Behavioral selection in structured populations.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2024Article
- Reuniting philosophy and science to advance cancer research.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Article
- The role of the ecological scaffold in the origin and maintenance of whole-group trait altruism in microbial populations.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Kin selection theory and the design of cooperative crops.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Evolution of class-structured populations in periodic environments.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Toward a theory of evolution as multilevel learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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1 author.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The theory of multilevel selection (MLS) is beset with conceptual difficulties. Although it is widely agreed that covariance between group trait and group fitness may arise in the natural world and drive a response to 'group selection', ambiguity exists over the precise meaning of group trait and group fitness and as to whether group selection should be defined according to changes in frequencies of different types of individual or different types of group. Moreover, the theory of MLS has failed to properly engage with the problem of class structure, which greatly limits its empirical application to, for example, social insects whose colonies are structured into separate age, sex, caste and ploidy classes. Here, I develop a genetical theory of MLS, to address these problems. I show that taking a genetical approach facilitates a decomposition of group-level traits - including reproductive success - into the separate contributions made by each constituent individual, even in the context of so-called emergence. However, I uncover a novel problem with the group-oriented approach: in many scenarios, it may not be possible to express a meaningful covariance between trait and fitness at the level of the social group, because the group's constituents belong to separate, irreconcilable classes.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.