Criticism
The use of the Price equation to support group selection has been recently challenged by van Veelen et al. (2012). They suggested that the Price equation is based on certain invalid mathematical assumptions.
The evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne noted:
Group selection isn’t widely accepted by evolutionists for several reasons. First, it’s not an efficient way to select for traits, like altruistic behavior, that are supposed to be detrimental to the individual but good for the group. Groups divide to form other groups much less often than organisms reproduce to form other organisms, so group selection for altruism would be unlikely to override the tendency of each group to quickly lose its altruists through natural selection favoring cheaters. Further, we simply have little evidence that selection on groups has promoted the evolution of any trait. Finally, other, more plausible evolutionary forces, like direct selection on individuals for reciprocal support, could have made us prosocial. These reasons explain why only a few biologists, like Wilson and E. O. Wilson (no relation), advocate group selection as the evolutionary source of cooperation.
Richard Dawkins and fellow advocates of the gene-centered view of evolution remain unconvinced about group selection. In particular, Dawkins suggests that group selection fails to make an appropriate distinction between replicators and vehicles. Steven Pinker concluded that "Group Selection has no useful role to play in psychology or social science."
Read more about this topic: Group Selection
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)