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The Return of the Group

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Kim Sterelny
Kim Sterelny*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Victoria, University of Wellington
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Extract

Once upon a time in evolutionary theory, everything happened for the best. Predators killed only the old or the sick. Pecking orders and other dominance hierarchies minimized wasteful conflict within the group. Male displays ensured that only the best and the fittest had mates. In the culmination of this tradition, Wynne-Edwards (1962, 1986) argued that many species have mechanisms that ensure groups do not over-exploit their resource base. The “central function” of territoriality in birds and other higher animals is “of limiting the numbers of occupants per unit area of habitat” (1986, 6). Species with dominance hierarchies, species with lekking breeding systems, and species with communal breeding regulate their populations. These social mechanisms have population regulation as their “underlying primary function” (1986, 9). Wynne-Edwards argued that these mechanisms evolve through group selection. Populations without such mechanisms are apt to go extinct by eroding their own resource base.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 562 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1996

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Footnotes

†

Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand; e-mail kimbo@kauri.vuw.ac.nz

‡

Thanks to Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Paul Griffiths, David Hull, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philip Kitcher, John Maynard Smith, Karen Neander and Jim Woodward for their comments on earlier versions of chunks of this paper. Thanks especially to David Sloan Wilson for very extensive correspondence on all the issues in this paper.

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