The rise, fall and resurrection of group selection

There is an interesting review article out there, showing the full circle that evolutionary debate has taken recently. Of course it is not really a full circle since each stage of the debate has brought us more understanding, and the new version of group selection is much more tested and refined (and quite different from) Darwin's original idea.

For any people interested in a bit of History I recommend:

The rise, fall and resurrection of group selection
Mark E. Borrello Program in History of Science and Technology, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, 100 Ecology Building, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, St Paul, MN 55108, USA

The changing fate of group selection theory illustrates nicely the importance of studying the history of science. It was Charles Darwin that first used something like group selection to explain how natural selection could give rise to altruistic behavior and moral instinct. These instincts could be accommodated by his theory of evolution, he argued, if they had evolved ‘for the good of the community’. By the 1960s, group selection had a new and vocal advocate in V.C. Wynne-Edwards. But this gave critics of the theory that selection might act on groups, rather than at the level of individuals or genes, a definable target, and from the mid-1960s to the 1980s group selection was considered the archetypal example of flawed evolutionary thinking. However, at the end of the 20th century ideas of group selection re-emerged as an important component of a multilevel theory of evolution.

In other words, not everything can be explained by purely genes (and I wonder how many people out there are actually surprised by this :) )

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