The criticism as I read it isn’t against group selection in general—just looking at Eliezer’s examples should tell you that he believes a type of group selection can and does exist.
The initial idea behind group selection, however, was that genes would be selected for that were detrimental to the individual, yet positive for the group. Wade’s experiment proved this wrong, without eliminating the idea of group selection altogether.
This is what Eliezer is saying is an evolutionary fairy tale. When group selection occurs, it absolutely must occur via a mechanism that gives individual genes an advantage. It cannot occur via allele sacrifice without in some way increasing the survival of the allele, because that allele will decrease in the population, preventing future sacrifice.
It’s the bias that led to the hypothesis that is obviously wrong in hindsight, and that is what Eliezer speaks against, not group selection in general (though I do think he thinks group selection isn’t nearly as influential as group selectionists wish it were). Anthropomorphic optimism is the reason group selectionists first hypothesized the pretty picture of restrained breeding, when the strategy that makes the most sense evolutionarily is cannibalism, and if they had been aware of their bias they may have actually predicted the optimal strategy before performing the experiment, instead of being so completely wrong.
The criticism as I read it isn’t against group selection in general—just looking at Eliezer’s examples should tell you that he believes a type of group selection can and does exist.
The initial idea behind group selection, however, was that genes would be selected for that were detrimental to the individual, yet positive for the group. Wade’s experiment proved this wrong, without eliminating the idea of group selection altogether.
This is what Eliezer is saying is an evolutionary fairy tale. When group selection occurs, it absolutely must occur via a mechanism that gives individual genes an advantage. It cannot occur via allele sacrifice without in some way increasing the survival of the allele, because that allele will decrease in the population, preventing future sacrifice.
It’s the bias that led to the hypothesis that is obviously wrong in hindsight, and that is what Eliezer speaks against, not group selection in general (though I do think he thinks group selection isn’t nearly as influential as group selectionists wish it were). Anthropomorphic optimism is the reason group selectionists first hypothesized the pretty picture of restrained breeding, when the strategy that makes the most sense evolutionarily is cannibalism, and if they had been aware of their bias they may have actually predicted the optimal strategy before performing the experiment, instead of being so completely wrong.