As an evolutionary biologist with an interest in practical applications to agriculture and to human longevity, I think your emphasis on the slow pace of evolution is misplaced. It took most of life’s 3.85 billion year history to evolve multicellularity, but that slowness seems to mainly reflect lack of selection for multicellularity over most of that period. With strong selection, primitive multicellularity can evolve quickly under lab conditions ( Boraas,M.E. 1998 “Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible origin of multicellularity” and current work in my lab).
Your point about individual vs. group selection is correct and important, though. Individual selection, like free-market competition, is an effective way of making certain kinds of improvements. But some form of group selection (the chicken example, or small-plot trials in plant breeding) is often key to improvements missed by individual-based natural selection. See my 2003 review article and forthcoming book on Darwinian Agriculture.
As an evolutionary biologist with an interest in practical applications to agriculture and to human longevity, I think your emphasis on the slow pace of evolution is misplaced. It took most of life’s 3.85 billion year history to evolve multicellularity, but that slowness seems to mainly reflect lack of selection for multicellularity over most of that period. With strong selection, primitive multicellularity can evolve quickly under lab conditions ( Boraas,M.E. 1998 “Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible origin of multicellularity” and current work in my lab).
Your point about individual vs. group selection is correct and important, though. Individual selection, like free-market competition, is an effective way of making certain kinds of improvements. But some form of group selection (the chicken example, or small-plot trials in plant breeding) is often key to improvements missed by individual-based natural selection. See my 2003 review article and forthcoming book on Darwinian Agriculture.