Evolution of interference competition by individual, family, and group selection

Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection

If we were told that a man lived a long and prosperous life in the world of Chicago gangsters, we would be entitled to make some guesses as to the sort of man he was . . . . Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world . . . . If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that ha...

Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection Models

Evolution of Individual Group Size Preference Can Increase Group-Level Selection and Cooperation

The question of how cooperative groups can evolve and be maintained is fundamental to understanding the evolution of social behaviour in general, and the major transitions in particular. Here, we show how selection on an individual trait for group size preference can increase variance in fitness at the group-level, thereby leading to an increase in cooperation through stronger group selection. ...

Competition and Selection in Language Evolution*

The primary thesis of this paper is that selection plays a role in language evolution. Underlying this position is the assumption that a language is a Lamarckian species, a construct extrapolated from idiolects spoken by individuals who acknowledge using the same verbal code to communicate with each other. There is no perfect replication in any case of language “acquisition”, which is actually ...

Sexual Selection, Social Competition, and Evolution*

Social behavior holds a special position among natural phenomena in relation to the Darwinian theory of organic evolution. When individuals of the same species live in close proximity they compete directly for essential resources. And intraspecific reproductive competition is the cornerstone of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Thus the drama of what G. E. Hutchinson (1965) referred...