Thank you for visiting nature.com. Rather, it is a proposal about how these concepts should be used, if we want them to mark a real and evolutionarily significant distinction among selection processes. It is to some extent a revisionary proposal, although, as I have been emphasizing, I see it as well aligned with Hamilton’s own views on how the distinction should be drawn.I do not intend to commit to a single quantitative measure of,How high does the degree of differential interaction between relatives have to be before we have a case of kin selection? Even in social insects, there are conflicts within the group, so it is better to analyze selection with Hamilton's rule (which This may occur even if the population of groups is simply a viscous population, with no well-defined meta-groups.These ideas may sound strange at first hearing, but they are simply unusual ways of describing something familiar. and JavaScript.Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.Department of Zoology, University College, London.SMITH, J. the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in The conditions for natural selection include fitness variation among individuals, so group selection must require fitness variation among groups for a direct analogy to hold.I reply that, although a direct analogy between the conditions for individual and group selection would be elegant, it does not deserve high priority. Formally, the relative density is defined in terms of two other concepts: the internal and total degree of a subgraph. There are two key ideas at the heart of my approach that mark important departures from Okasha’s. For example, there might be higher-level group selection for genes that promote cooperation among members of the same meta-group who are located in different first-order groups.The population of groups may also be kin-structured. Published: 14 March 1964; Group Selection and Kin Selection. As with group selection, it is a consequence of the properties of … J. Theor. The relationship between kin selection and group (or multi-level) selection is a longstanding source of controversy in the social evolution literature. I will label these properties as.To be clear, this proposal is not intended to capture all current usages of the terms ‘kin selection’ and ‘group selection’. First, here are Hamilton’s ([.If we insist that group selection is different from kin selection the term should be restricted to situations of assortation definitely not involving kin. But the distinction is not clean or neat; it is not a dichotomy.A second inspiration is Peter Godfrey-Smith’s ([,The mathematical literature on network analysis gives us some formal tools with which to quantify the extent to which a network approximates these extreme cases. Population size. First, I see the causal differences between kin selection and group selection as differences of degree, not all-or-nothing differences explicable in terms of the presence or absence of certain causal relationships. The mathematical relation between group fitness (.Okasha’s graphs for paradigm cases of group selection posit ‘bottom-up’ causal relationships between individual gene frequencies and the group gene frequency and ‘top-down’ causal relationships between the group mean fitness and individual fitness values. Though Darwin’s original theory of evolution and natural selection stresses the role of selective forces acting on individuals of varying fitness, group-oriented ‘altruistic’ behaviours within the animal kingdom, such as worker castes in social insects and alarm cries in bird flocks, have been documented … History and Interpretation of Kin Selection Theory,The Genetical Theory of Multilevel Selection,Capturing the Superorganism: A Formal Theory of Group Adaptation,Local Interaction, Multilevel Selection, and Evolutionary Transitions,Varieties of Population Structure and the Levels of Selection,British Journal for the Philosophy of Science,Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection,On Multilevel Selection and Kin Selection: Contextual Analysis Meets Direct Fitness,Contextual Analysis of Models of Group Selection, Soft Selection, Hard Selection, and the Evolution of Altruism.Experimental Studies of Group Selection: What Do They Tell Us about Group Selection in Nature?The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour I and II,A Method for Analyzing Selection in Hierarchically Structured Populations,Co-residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure.Are Ant Supercolonies Crucibles of a New Major Transition in Evolution?Multilevel Selection in Kin Selection Language,Group Selection and Kin Selection: Formally Equivalent Approaches,Social Evolution and Inclusive Fitness Theory: An Introduction,The Interplay between Relatedness and Horizontal Gene Transfer Drives the Evolution of Plasmid-Carried Public Goods,Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B,Quantitative Genetic Versions of Hamilton’s Rule with Empirical Applications,Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B,Darwinian Dynamics: Evolutionary Transitions in Fitness and Individuality,Group Selection, Altruism, and Structured-Deme Models,Genetic Relatedness and the Evolution of Altruism,The Relation between Kin and Multi-Level Selection: An Approach Using Causal Graphs,Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference,Extension of Covariance Selection Mathematics,Kin Selection and Frequency Dependence: A Game-theoretic Approach,Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society,Quantitative Genetics, Inclusive Fitness, and Group Selection,Beyond Society: The Evolution of Organismality,Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,Bacterial Cooperation Controlled by Mobile Genetic Elements: Kin Selection and Infectivity Are Part of the Same Process,Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behaviour.Mathematics of Kin- and Group-Selection: Formally Equivalent?Group Selection and Inclusive Fitness Are Not Equivalent; The Price Equation vs. Models and Statistics,Social Behaviour: Genes, Ecology, and Evolution,Evolutionary Explanations for Cooperation,Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.Can Altruism Evolve in Purely Viscous Populations?© The Author(s) 2018.