Social selection

Mutation and Selection

Social selection is a term used with varying meanings in biology.

Joan Roughgarden proposed a hypothesis called social selection as an alternative to sexual selection. Social selection is argued to be a mode of natural selection based on reproductive transactions and a two-tiered approach to evolution and the development of social behavior.[1] Reproductive transactions refer to a situation where one organism offers assistance to another in exchange for access to reproductive opportunity. The two tiers of the theory are behavioral and population genetic.[1][2] The genetic aspect states that anisogamy arose to maximize contact rate between gametes. The behavioral aspect is concerned with cooperative game theory and the formation of social groups to maximize the production of offspring. In her critique against the neo-Darwinian defense of sexual selection, Roughgarden outlines exceptions to many of the assumptions that come with sexual selection.[1] These exceptions include sexually monomorphic species, species which reverse standard sex roles, species with template multiplicity, species with transgender presentation, frequencies of homosexual mating, and the lack of correlation between sexually selected traits and deleterious mutation.[3]

An article published by Roughgarden's lab on her ideas received criticism in the journal Science. Forty scientists produced ten critical letters. The critics stated that the article was misleading, that it contained misunderstandings and misrepresentations, that sexual selection accounted for all the data presented and subsumed Roughgarden's theoretical analysis, and that sexual selection explained data that her theory could not.[4][5]

Other researchers, such as biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard and evolutionary medicine researcher Randolph M. Nesse, instead view sexual selection as a subcategory of social selection,[list 1] with Nesse and anthropologist Christopher Boehm arguing further that altruism in humans held fitness advantages that enabled evolutionarily extraordinary cooperativeness and the human capability of creating culture, as well as desertion, abandonment, banishment, and capital punishment by band societies against bullies, thieves, free-riders, and psychopaths.[list 2]

  1. ^ a b c Roughgarden, Joan (2009). Genial Gene. California: The Regents of University of California. ISBN 978-0-520-25826-6.
  2. ^ Roughgarden, Joan; Açkay, Erol. "Do we need a Sexual Selection 2.0?". The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
  3. ^ Roughgarden, Joan; Akçay, Erol (2009). "Final response:sexual selection needs an alternative". The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference thescientist was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference tenletters was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference West-Eberhard 1975 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference West-Eberhard 1979 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference West-Eberhard 1983 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference West-Eberhard 2014 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Lyon, Bruce E.; Montgomerie, Robert (2012). "Sexual selection is a form of social selection". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 367 (1600). London, UK: Royal Society: 2266–2273. doi:10.1098/rstb.2012.0012. PMC 3391428. PMID 22777015.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference Nesse 2019 pp. 172–76 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Boehm, Christopher (1999). "The Natural Selection of Altruistic Traits" (PDF). Human Nature. 10 (3). Springer Science+Business Media: 205–252. doi:10.1007/s12110-999-1003-z. PMID 26196335. S2CID 207392341. Retrieved July 7, 2021.
  13. ^ Boehm, Christopher (2001) [1999]. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Revised ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674006911.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference Nesse 2007 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference Nesse 2009 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Boehm, Christopher (2012). Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465020485.
  17. ^ Boehm, Christopher (2014). "The moral consequences of social selection". Behaviour. 151 (2–3). Brill Publishers: 167–183. doi:10.1163/1568539X-00003143. Retrieved July 7, 2021.


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