In "Some Criticism of the Contextual Approach, and a Few Proposals" in Biological Theory, Brian McLoone discusses some of the points about the contextual approach that I made in a recent paper. Besides offering a reply to McLoone’s comments on my paper, in this article I show why McLoone’s discussion of the two main frameworks for thinking about group selection—the contextual and the Price approach—is partly misguided. In particular, I show that one of McLoone’s main arguments against the contextual approach (...) is missing the target and that one of his (and Elliott Sober’s) arguments in defense of the Price approach is flawed. Criticizing these arguments will help me present an entirely different picture than McLoone’s of the current status of multilevel selection theory. More precisely, I argue that the idea that we are dealing with "multilevel selection" in the type of multigroup cases in which the focal units are the individuals (and their traits) has recently come under threat. Finally, I discuss the ways in which this idea might be salvaged by appealing either to the contextual or to the Price approach. (shrink)

It has become customary in multilevel selection theory to use the same terms to denote both two explanatory goals and two explanatory means. This paper spells out some of the benefits that derive from avoiding this terminological conflation. I argue that keeping explanatory means and goals well apart allows us to see that, contrary to a popular recent idea, Price’s equation and contextual analysis—the statistical methods most extensively used for measuring the effects of certain evolutionary factors on the change in (...) the focal individual trait in multilevel selection scenarios—do not come with built-in notions of group selection and, therefore, the efficacy of these methods at analyzing various kinds of cases does not constitute a basis for deciding how group selection should best be defined. Moreover, contrary to another widely accepted idea, I argue that more than one type of group selection may serve as explanatory means when one’s goal is that of explaining the evolution of individual traits in multilevel selection scenarios and I spell out how this explanatory role should be understood. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify two general positions with respect to the relationship between environment and natural selection. These positions consist in claiming that selective claims need and, respectively, need not be relativized to homogenous environments. I then show that adopting one or the other position makes a difference with respect to the way in which the effects of selection are to be measured in certain cases in which the focal population is distributed over heterogeneous environments. Moreover, I show that (...) these two positions lead to two different interpretations—the Pricean and contextualist ones—of a type of selection scenarios in which multiple groups varying in properties affect the change in the metapopulation mean of individual-level traits. Showing that these two interpretations stem from different attitudes towards environmental homogeneity allows me to argue: that, unlike the Pricean interpretation, the contextualist interpretation can only claim that drift or selection is responsible for the change in frequency of the focal trait in a given metapopulation if details about whether or not group formation is random are specified; that the traditional main objection against the Pricean interpretation—consisting in arguing that the latter takes certain side-effects of individual selection to be effects of group selection—is unconvincing. This leads me to suggest that the ongoing debate about which of the two interpretations is preferable should concentrate on different issues than previously thought. (shrink)

In this article I explore some statistical difficulties confronting going conceptions of ‘group’ as understood in accounts of group selection. Most such theories require real groups but define the reality of groups in ways that make it impossible to test for their reality. There are alternatives, but they either require or invite a nominalism about groups that many theorists abjure.

This article proposes two conditions to assess whether an entity at a level of description is a unit of selection qua interactor. These two conditions make it possible to (1) distinguish biologically relevant entities from arbitrary ones and (2) distinguish units that can _potentially_ enter a selection process from those that have already done so. I show that the classical approaches used in the literature on units and levels of selection do not fare well with respect to either or both (...) of these desiderata. (shrink)

This paper addresses the foundations of Teleological Individualism, the view that organisms, even non-sentient organisms, are goal-oriented systems while biological collectives, such as ecosystems or conspecific groups, are mere assemblages of organisms. Typical defenses of Teleological Individualism ground the teleological organization of organisms in the workings of natural selection. This paper shows that grounding teleological organization in natural selection is antithetical to Teleological Individualism because such views assume a view about the units of selection on which it is only individual (...) organisms that are units of selection. However, none of the Conventionalist, Reductionist, or Multi-Level Realist theories serve to justify such an assumption. Thus, Teleological Individualism cannot be grounded in natural selection. (shrink)