Explanatory goals and explanatory means in multilevel selection theory
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Explanatory goals and explanatory means in multilevel selection theory Ciprian Jeler1
Received: 21 December 2019 / Accepted: 30 July 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract It has become customary in multilevel selection theory to use the same terms (namely “multilevel selection 1” and “multilevel selection 2”) to denote both two explanatory goals (explaining why certain individual- and, respectively, grouplevel traits spread) and two explanatory means (namely, two kinds of group selection we may appeal to in such explanations). This paper spells out some of the benefits that derive from avoiding this terminological conflation. I argue that keeping explanatory means and goals well apart allows us to see that, contrary to a popular recent idea, Price’s equation and contextual analysis—the statistical methods most extensively used for measuring the effects of certain evolutionary factors (like individual selection, group selection etc.) on the change in the focal individual trait in multilevel selection scenarios—do not come with built-in notions of group selection and, therefore, the efficacy of these methods at analyzing various kinds of cases does not constitute a basis for deciding how group selection should best be defined. Moreover, contrary to another widely accepted idea, I argue that more than one type of group selection may serve as explanatory means when one’s goal is that of explaining the evolution of individual traits in multilevel selection scenarios and I spell out how this explanatory role should be understood. Keywords Philosophy of biology · Group selection · Multilevel selection · MLS1 · Price equation · Contextual analysis
* Ciprian Jeler [email protected] 1
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research – Social Sciences and Humanities Research Department, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Iaşi, Romania
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1 Introduction Multilevel selection denotes the idea that natural selection may act at multiple levels of biological organization at the same time. For simplicity, most discussions in the field refer to cases with only two levels at which putative selection processes occur; in such scenarios, the entity at the higher level (whether it is a multicellular organism, a colony/community of organisms, a species etc.) is usually called a “group,” whereas the lower-level entities (be they genes, cells, organisms etc.) are called “individuals.” I also adopt these terms here. In a seminal article, Damuth and Heisler (1988)—henceforth D&H—distinguished between what they call the “multilevel selection 1” (for short MLS1) and “multilevel selection 2” (for short MLS2) perspectives/analyses. When one adopts an MLS1 perspective (or conducts an MLS1 analysis) one is interested in the change in average value of individual-level traits and in explaining why this change occurs (i.e. what evolutionary factors affect it). On the other hand, an MLS2 perspective is adopted (or an MLS2 analysis is conducted) when one is interested in the ch
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