For decades Darwinian processes were framed in the form of the Lewontin conditions: reproduction, variation and differential reproductive success were taken to be sufficient and necessary. Since Buss and the work of Maynard Smith and Szathmary biologists were eager to explain the major transitions from individuals to groups forming new individuals subject to Darwinian mechanisms themselves. Explanations that seek to explain the emergence of a new level of selection, however, cannot employ properties that would already have to exist on (...) that level for selection to take place. Recently, Hammerschmidt et al. provided a ‘bottom-up’ experiment corroborating much of the theoretical work Paul Rainey has done since 2003 on how cheats can play an important role in the emergence of new Darwinian individuals on a multicellular level. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, I argue for a conceptual shift in perspective from seeing cheats as a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved for multi-cellularity to evolve to the very ‘key’ for the evolution of multicellularity. Secondly, I illustrate the consequences of this shift for both theoretical and experimental work, arguing for a more prominent role of ecology and the multi-level selection framework within the debate then they currently occupy. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether it is fruitful to describe the role culture began to play at some point in the Hominin lineage as pointing to a transition in individuality, by reference to the works of Buss, Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry, Michod and Godfrey-Smith. The chief question addressed is whether a population of groups having different cultural phenotypes is either paradigmatically Darwinian or marginal, by using Godfrey-Smith's representation of such transitions in a multi-dimensional space. Richerson and Boyd's «dual inheritance» theory, and the (...) explanation it provides of the evolution of cooperation in the Hominin lineage, is taken into account to shed light on the way Godfrey-Smith deals with cultural evolution, especially concerning the amount of variation in a population of groups with various cultural phenotypes, the role played by multi-level selection in the evolutionary dynamics of such a population and the adequacy of different modalities of group- reproduction. (shrink)