7
dist
urbing, each of the formulations seemed based in large part on the
premise that the individual is the basic unit of evolutionary change.
Competition between groups had been shuffled off the stage.
Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards, a
careful observer of his country's native red grouse, concluded that
these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep
their flock from starvation. The grouse, Edwards contended, sensed
the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted
their behavior accordingly, delaying breeding when supplies looked
meager or even opting for total chastity.12 The interests of the group,
concluded Edwards, overrode those of the individual.
The backlash to the University of Aberdeen professor's heresy
was immediate and intense. Scientists like G.C. Williams and David
Lack declared that group selection was "all but impossible."13 And
august theorists like W.D. Hamilton and R.L. Trivers explained away
the "altruistic" tendencies Wynne-Edwards had discerned by
generating a new mathematical system, the theory of kin selection,
which said that individuals would only sacrifice their own interests in
favor of others if the others in question were relatives, creatures who
contained similar sets of genes.14 In other words, self-sacrifice
represented an individualistic gene selfishly protecting a copy of itself.
The newly-consolidated theories of individual and kin selection
were hailed as major achievements and became biological dogma.
Wynne-Edwards' carefully-reasoned theory, based on decades of fact
gathering in the field, was tossed aside as a disreputable aberration. So
the Scotsman spent fourteen years in the heather gathering fresh
information, tabulated the resulting statistics, then printed the
conclusions in his 1986 work Evolution Through Group Selection. The
book was virtually ignored.15
However, in the late '80s, an uneasy sense that evolution may not
be limited to the level of the individual organism or gene showed signs
of inching toward sciences' peripheral vision. Stephen Jay Gould
puzzled over the fact that there's too much genetic variation--more
<< < GO > >>
7
dist
urbing, each of the formulations seemed based in large part on the
premise that the individual is the basic unit of evolutionary change.
Competition between groups had been shuffled off the stage.
Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards, a
careful observer of his country's native red grouse, concluded that
these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep
their flock from starvation. The grouse, Edwards contended, sensed
the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted
their behavior accordingly, delaying breeding when supplies looked
meager or even opting for total chastity.12 The interests of the group,
concluded Edwards, overrode those of the individual.
The backlash to the University of Aberdeen professor's heresy
was immediate and intense. Scientists like G.C. Williams and David
Lack declared that group selection was "all but impossible."13 And
august theorists like W.D. Hamilton and R.L. Trivers explained away
the "altruistic" tendencies Wynne-Edwards had discerned by
generating a new mathematical system, the theory of kin selection,
which said that individuals would only sacrifice their own interests in
favor of others if the others in question were relatives, creatures who
contained similar sets of genes.14 In other words, self-sacrifice
represented an individualistic gene selfishly protecting a copy of itself.
The newly-consolidated theories of individual and kin selection
were hailed as major achievements and became biological dogma.
Wynne-Edwards' carefully-reasoned theory, based on decades of fact
gathering in the field, was tossed aside as a disreputable aberration. So
the Scotsman spent fourteen years in the heather gathering fresh
information, tabulated the resulting statistics, then printed the
conclusions in his 1986 work Evolution Through Group Selection. The
book was virtually ignored.15
However, in the late '80s, an uneasy sense that evolution may not
be limited to the level of the individual organism or gene showed signs
of inching toward sciences' peripheral vision. Stephen Jay Gould
puzzled over the fact that there's too much genetic variation--more
<< < GO > >>