One problem with your hypothesis is that you use words in a non-standard way. If you have your unique definitions and everybody else uses the words in another meaning, you will not be understood and your suggestions will be rejected. There can be no fruiful interactive development of ideas when you use an alien language - apparently similar words but meanings something alien.
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You can build models - especially mathematical ones - that aren’t based on data. But the whole point of doing so is then to validate them against real-world data - actual numbers - which isn’t being done here.
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Still not clear - you’re just repeating what you said earlier with extra examples. There are no specifics.
What do you think is recorded, and how?
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To increase common understanding. lets return to the meaning of the words, starting from evolution.
‘Evolution’ is a word that has been used in many contexts but biological evolution includes some basic elements:
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offspring resemble their parents because something mediates the characteristics of the parent to the offspring (heritability)
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although the offspring resemble their parents, they are not exact copies of the parents. Some mechanism(s) cause changes in the characteristics (phenotype) of the individuals. If these changes are heritable, at least some of the offspring get the ‘novel’ characteristics.
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because of differences in the phenotypes between the individuals, some individuals or phenotypes succeed to produce more (grand)offspring than the others living in the same environment, increasing the proportion of their heritage in the future population (fitness differences).
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changes in the proportion of heritable characteristics among individuals from one generation to the next ones is called (biological) evolution.
A well known mechanism that transfers the characteristics of the parents to the offspring is DNA. You seem to suggest that there are also other mechanisms because DNA analyses do not seem to support your hypothesis. What could such a mechanism be?
Natural selection is system-specific in the sense that the local conditions determine which characteristics of the organisms are beneficial in that environment. Offspring may be born in an environment that is similar than where their parents lived. They would face similar natural selection but the environment would not transfer the characteristics of the parents to the offspring and it would not cause heritable changes in the characteristics. Filtering of individuals with beneficial characteristics would lead to a similar ‘direction’ of evolution among the parents and offspring but would not explain the other basic features of evolution.
Because of this, environment cannot be the ‘memory’ that explains how the structural information is transferred from parents to the offspring. Well, to be more accurate, the environment may explain the transfer of culture but not the underlying physical characteristics that are transferred through the DNA.
You need something else than the environment (system) to act as the ‘memory’. What could it be, in addition to DNA (or RNA)?
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No data (i.e. knowledge), no science (just incoherent, unwarranted, unjustified, grandiose belief); another just so story like group selection.
Group selection may work in special cases, so it is not just imagination. You just need to understand that group selection and individual-level selection are intertwined, rather than separate and competing explanations.
By the way, did you know that you are not (purely) an individual?
You could be called a ‘holobiont’, that is an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit.
If you live in an environment with modern healthcare and hygiene standards, you probably include less species than an individual living in more natural conditions but anyhow, many species. If the associated species would be taken away, you would probably get sick and maybe die.
Long live the symbionts within and on us!
Edit:
The understanding of this ‘holobiont’ perspective has spread. Here, city planners have started to add forest soil to some sand boxes intended for small children. They are monitoring the use and if the families accept and use these sand boxes, they will add forest soils to many more sand boxes in public playgrounds. Research has shown that small children getting much contact with forest soils are healthier and have less allergy because they get beneficial microbes from the forest soil.
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That’s been the case since the first cell.
I’d like some hard evidence for falsifiable group selection.
That individuals have selfish genes that promote sociality for their benefit, like the human social contract, is entirely self interested. Including sacrificial altruism. Genes ‘recognize’ themselves in others: kinship.
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IIRC there is a species of marmot that survives the winter months huddled in underground burrows, in conditions that favour a limited range of individuals per burrow - too few and they can’t maintain a high enough temperature; too many and those in the middle can’t survive.
This produces selection towards groups of a particular size, which has led to groups consisting of a dominant mating pair, their offspring, and a few other adults.
For another example, check out Meerkat manor, which covers a multi-year study on the relative success of several interacting groups of meerkats. This one has the bonus of cuteness combined with politics.
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One hypothesis claims that the balance between cooperation vs. competition, extending to group vs. individual level selection, is dependent on external conditions. When external conditions are such that individuals would not survive alone, it is profitable to switch to cooperation, and the survival becomes dependent on group-level variables. When external conditions turn to more favourable, the individuals start to play selfish strategies and the balance shifts from cooperation to competition, meaning that individual-level characteristics become more important than group-level characteristics.
This can be explained with ‘standard’ evolution (the ‘selfish’ advantage of an individual) but the point is that the survival and success may depend on characteristics at the level of an individual, a group, or both. If the survival and success depends on the characteristics at the level of the group, more than those of the individual, then we can invoke group selection.
An extreme example of this is lichens. A lichen is not an individual, it is a symbiotic assemblage of two or three participating species. Usually, we only see the lichen, the symbiotic assemblage (group). However, in extremely favourable conditions, the participants may separate - if the algae does not need the other(s), it may start to grow alone, individually.
An opposite example is the corals growing in warming waters. The coral is a symbiotic assemblage. If the temperature rises above a critical threshold, the algae leave the symbiosis, the remaining corals bleach and the symbiotic coral organisms may die.
These examples stress what I wrote earlier, that group and individual level selection are intertwined, not separate and competing explanations.
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If it can all be explained, which it is, by standard “selfish” evolution, much as I want it to be otherwise, like certain other hypotheses (Love as the ground of infinite, eternal being, for one, as all the unfaithed would), then that explanation is all that is required until it’s falsified by data.
Multispecies symbiosis is analogous to the first cells and colonial (Portuguese man o’ war) and hive organisms and is not a manifestation of group selection applicable to extricable organisms.
GPT
…multispecies symbiosis, especially in cases like lichens, corals, or the Portuguese man o’ war, represents a form of evolutionary integration, not a loose coalition of extricable individuals subject to group-level selection in the classical sense.
Symbiosis as Evolutionary Fusion
- These entities are not groups in the Darwinian sense of interacting individuals competing or cooperating within a population.
- They are composite organisms—obligate holobionts—where the parts cannot survive independently under normal conditions.
- The first cells likely emerged from such fusion events: mitochondria and chloroplasts are ancient symbionts, now fully integrated.
In this light, group selection—which requires variation among groups, differential survival, and reproduction of group traits—doesn’t apply. There’s no group boundary that allows for selection between extricable units. The symbiotic whole is the unit.
…thinkers like John Dupré and Christopher Lean, who argue that multispecies individuals challenge traditional notions of individuality but do not necessarily validate group selection. Instead, they suggest a new ontology: organisms as processual collectives, not bounded agents.
…transitional stages—where symbionts are still semi-independent—could be modeled using multilevel selection theory (MLS1). But even then, the selection is on the emergent whole, not on the group as a collection of extricable individuals.
…multispecies symbiosis is not a manifestation of group selection in the way it’s applied to meerkats, marmots, or human societies. It’s a different evolutionary story—one of fusion, not federation.
As group selection remains a fantasy, anamnesis isn’t even wrong.
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See above Roy. It’s ALL selfish gene.
Selfish genes and group selection aren’t incompatible.
From the genes’ point of view, selection at the level of individual organisms is group selection …
Group selection is a superfluous just so story with no evidence whatsoever.
Metaphorical rhetoric isn’t evidence.
Unless T knows of any?
In physiology, and anatomy and morphology converging on engineering requirements, as from the Cambrian. Physiology looks totally deterministic in the matter of respiratory proteins from as soon as it could rain, given a hundred million years of Earth lab’s third of a billion cubic miles of water with every stirred physical and especially chemical gradient to cook in, in the Hadean.
Precise words don’t cross domains. They are specific to a domain.
No, it’s not. For sexual species, a species is a population that interbreeds. It is not an ecosystem, a biome, or a system. Those things are COLLECTIONS of species. Also, DNA is the molecule of inheritance, so it matters. Having separately interbreeding species using DNA for heredity matters, especially in fields like population genetics which has actual useable equations that describe real biology.
That evolution only makes sense if we understand what species are and how traits are inherited.
No, it doesn’t. Not even close.
Are you kidding me??? Pull the other one.
You have invented jargon in biology.
WHY???
Yes, because he understood what species were, unlike you. Traits stay within species, and any modifications will be passed down within the species. Your claims do away with this.
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But they do. This is observed. Random mutations are observed in actual biology. The differences we see between species is exactly what we would expect to see if random mutations are the cause of those differences.
That doesn’t mean anything. It’s word salad.
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Of course, not the exact same result, but very similar. Convergent evolution to the max.
Maybe we need to explicitly describe what is meant by “group selection”, because I suspect everyone has a different idea of what it means (and Wikipedia isn’t helping for once).
I’m tempted to modify one of my GA’s to use group selection rather than individual selection, just to see what happens.
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I.e., Kids don’t randomly generate ideas. They unlock understanding they’re ready for when the environment challenges them, building toward models that work better and fit reality.
Selection for social interactions can most certainly be selected for in species. Ants and bees are good examples. If a heritable trait is responsible for a type of social interaction, and that social interaction increases the rate at which that trait is passed on, then it will be selected for. Hamilton’s work on kin selection is considered by many to be one of the classic works on evolution.
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