Continuing this post, therein I linked to Pinker's criticism of the phenomenon, as well as commentary on Pinker's claims. One response is by evolutionary biologist David C. Queller, wherein he said:
"Modern group selection theory is as mathematically rigorous as
individual selection or inclusive fitness theory. I say this despite
being someone who favors the inclusive fitness approach and whose entire
career has been based on it. I think of these less as alternative
theories that make different predictions than as two different languages
describing the same world. They simply divide up fitness in slightly
different ways – inclusive fitness into effects on self versus others,
and multilevel selection into between-group and within-group parts – and
a simple partition of fitness should not alter predictions.
Inclusive fitness became popular, despite the head start enjoyed by
multilevel selection thinking, because it successfully weighted the
relative importance of its two fitness components, using genetic
relatedness. Without a similar set of weights, group selection
advantages could not be accurately judged, and their strength and
importance was often overemphasized. [...] However, modern multilevel
selection theory does have such weights, the between-group and
within-group genetic variances, whose ratio happens to be relatedness of
the actor to its groupmates (including itself). Once the proper
weights are accounted for, the two approaches give essentially identical
results."
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