ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Group and individual selection during evolutionary transitions in individuality: meanings and partitions.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 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
- Major transitions in sociocultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Stability of ecologically scaffolded traits during evolutionary transitions in individuality.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Group-selection via aggregative propagule-formation enables cooperative multicellularity in an individual based, spatial model.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
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- Toward a theory of evolution as multilevel learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- The Consequences of Budding versus Binary Fission on Adaptation and Aging in Primitive Multicellularity.Genes · 2021Article
- Variation and multilevel selection of SARS-CoV-2.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2020Article
- Fifty years of the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The Price equation embodies the 'conditions approach' to evolution in which the Darwinian conditions of heritable variation in fitness are represented in equation form. The equation can be applied recursively, leading to a partition of selection at the group and individual levels. After reviewing the well-known issues with the Price partition, as well as issues with a partition based on contextual analysis, we summarize a partition of group and individual selection based on counterfactual fitness, the fitness that grouped cells would have were they solitary. To understand 'group selection' in multi-level selection models, we assume that only group selection can make cells suboptimal when they are removed from the group. Our analyses suggest that there are at least three kinds of selection that can be occurring at the same time: group-specific selection along with two kinds of individual selection, within-group selection and global individual selection. Analyses based on counterfactual fitness allow us to specify how close a group is to being a pseudo-group, and this can be a basis for quantifying progression through an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI). During an ETI, fitnesses at the two levels, group and individual, become decoupled, in the sense that fitness in a group may be quite high, even as counterfactual fitness goes to zero. This article is part of the theme issue 'Fifty years of the Price equation'.
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