Talk:Unit of selection

message: This article has serious POV inspired errors:
# There is virtually no such things as a right-wing evolutionary biologist, almost all are left wing.  Scientists, including  evolutionary biologist, usually end up being wrong when they let their politics get involved.
# Right wing people who speak in favor of natural selection make the exact same group selectionist mistake as left wing people, like Gould.  Group selection probably does exist, but its a very minor force, much dominated by other units of selection.
# Gene level selection had the only workable mathematical models for altruism, or much of anything, for most of the last 30 years.  Its only recently that quite sophisticated multi-level selection models have begun to displace it.
# Individual level selection seems incorrectly described here so as to make it only a semantic diffrence from gene level selection.
# Much modern modeling work doesn't really need to specify the unit of selection, as much general understanding derived from the gene level model has percolated through the community and sidelined the debate in favor of more practical matters.  So, while this is an extremely important topic for historical reasons, the current work directly related to units of selection is now quite theoretical; while applied work simply uses the tools provided by the gene level model.  Just because they discovered quantum mechanics doesn't mean calculous is wrong.
JeffBurdges 11:28, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes,  has a problem with representing NPOV, hence Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Marcosantezana. This should be mentioned there. — Dunc|☺ 13:46, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting, glad to know a fundamental issue will be worked out.  However, I'm not an involved party, nor have I attempted other resolutions with Marcosantezana, so I'm not sure its appropriate for me to be involved in the case.  I'm not sure the arbitors want to hear about every editorial problem the user has caused.  Is a "Statments by Uninvolved Parties" section an acceptable feature of an arbitration page?  JeffBurdges 15:03, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Alright, its done & improved.  JeffBurdges 17:41, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There are several people who are so fed up with his ownership mentality that they do not edit anything. Untill the arbitration case is finished, I refrain from editing. KimvdLinde 01:47, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure this is the right place to put this comment; this is my first exposure to this arbitration process and indeed this peculiar behavior of a user.  I have dealt with creationists in other contexts, but this is downright weird.  It is obvious that Marco has a keen grasp of the material and has something constructive to contribute, yet remains totally unwilling to work within the Wikipedia community.  I wonder if there are any psychologists or sociologists specifically studying behavioral pathologies on wikipedia. Safay 23:38, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[User:Marcosantezana|Marcosantezana]] ([[User talk:Marcosantezana|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/Marcosantezana|contribs]])

message: "....A unit of selection is a biological entity within the hierarchy of biological organisation (e.g. genes, cells, individuals, groups, species) that is subject to natural selection..." -- Who is the person that formally established this? Scientific theories are always formally established.   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.17.51.103 (talk) 20:22, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who defined a unit of selection? 

message: I quickly tried to add some structure and for the intro pared down the convoluted prose.  Maybe this will help guide it into a more coherent whole.  It is still far from being readable but with time and help we can all pull it together.
Safay 00:57, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Restructure 

message: Marcos seems to have expressed a different point from Sober here, or if he is expressing Sober's point I don't find it clear enough. This is the sentence I  have issue with: The description of the causation chain in this case of selection can be stopped at the individual level because the generation of fitness differences is supervenient to the (various possible) causes below the individual level (i.e. differences in speed were necessary and sufficient in this case of selection).
If an event has multiple causes I don't think Sober is giving us any basis for choosing between them. The individual gazelle is the unit of selection in the example because the gazelle is the entity whose property (speed) is the cause of selection. For high speed to be a cause of selection in Sober's sense it must
#Increase gazelles' reproductive success in at least one case and reduce it in none.
#Identify a single (or similar sorts of) causal process
Sober says p94,  'disjunctive properties will appear to be causally efficacious only to the degree that their disjuncts strike us a resembling similar sorts of causal processes' . On the other hand supervenient properties, such as (overall) fitness, are not causally efficacious. Sober uses supervenience of fitness to argue p96  'the overall fitness of a trait does not cause survival and reproduction' . So I have removed the sentence for now. — Axel147 02:07, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Individual selection part

message: * "Artificial Selection" only used once by Darwin and did not appear before his publication.
 * "Survival of the fittest" was invented by Darwin and occurs 16 times.
 * reproductive success, differential appears nowhere in Origin of Species
 * Artificial Selection was never defined by Darwin.
 * Only attempts to define Natural Selection once in the entire book.
 * Natural Selection is repeated over 300 times.
 * Micro and Macro Evolution were not used by Darwin, only Evolution.
Differential reproduction can be rephrased as unsimilar reproduction. 99.99% organisms reproduce not clone carbon
copies of themselves and thus differential is superfluous. If there are 0.01% that actually produce exact clones
of themselves would somebody inform me? In trying to get a conceptual grip on what a Unit of Selection is many posters
have used this phrase reproductin success. We can't define the concept Unit of Selection before we define phrases 
that are used to formally establish the concept. Who has formally defined or established what reproductive success
means? A Wikipedia entry gets a redirect to Natural Selection. Are the two concepts related, who has formally established
that they are one and the same thing, published where? And if beavers were ment to produce A-frames then their present 
structures can't be described as a "success". For something to be a success, one needs to specify some sort of goal. 
TongueSpeaker 20:57, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Differential Reproduction

message:  tag added.  Every section of the article contains unreferenced information.  Shayno 11:27, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Unreferenced

message: Would it be appropriate to organize this article around the functional levels of organization?   
;Perhaps something like:
# Level of the gene
# Level of the cell
# Level of the tissue
# Level of the organ
# Level of the organ system
# Level of the individual
# Level of the population
## Level of the group
# Level of the species
# Level of the community
;Or perhaps:
# Individual level and below
## Level of the gene
## Level of the cell
## Level of the tissue
## Level of the organ
## Level of the organ system
## Level of the individual
# Group level
## Level of the population
## Level of the species
## Level of the community
Just some thoughts... EPM 23:25, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Levels of Organization

message: I have removed the zig-zag argument for 2 main reasons 1) it appears to suffer from a bit of bias not clearly representing the original source 2) it is a negative argument: there is no positive proposal as to what a unit of selection should be.
Of course the zig-zagging occurs and is in one sense 'invisible' when the gene rather than the genotype is used as a unit of selection. But this 'invisibility' is a symptom of the fact that fitness and evolution are typically defined in terms of frequencies of genes, genotypes or traits. If ones looks at both frequencies and distributions within other entities the zig-zag can be modelled perfectly well while maintaining the gene as a unit of selection. 
'The concept of selection as a force and as a cause of evolution' is only lost if a unit of selection is something that causes selection (where cause is defined in a certain way) rather than somethings that simply gets selected. This is a definitional issue. The criticism that the gene is not in general a cause has already been made in the article.  — Axel147 21:57, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of Zig-Zag Argument 

message: The idea is outdated and has fallen out of favor.  As explained by Mayr:
" The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong.  In the 30's and 40's, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years. "
Mayr again:
"On one occasion Dawkins (ref. 13, point 7) himself admits that the gene is not an object of selection: “. . . genetic replicators are selected not directly, but by proxy . . . [by] their phenotypic effects.” Precisely! Nor are combinations of genes, as for instance chromosomes, independent objects of selection; only their carriers are. "
How can you reconcile these facts about chromosomes with the gene being the unit of selection?
Mayr should be noted here.  He is much more important to evolutionary theory than Dawkins.
Savagedjeff (talk) 01:24, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The debate is noted at the start of the article.  For the purposes of the article we only need to know that some (significant) people believe in gene-level selection. Shayno (talk) 16:57, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The gene isn't the unit of selection. 

message: I believe the rabbit/virus example in "Selection at the level of the group" is from Lewontin's 1970 paper - however, it's not a direct quote - is it a paraphrase from a different source? Chgrs (talk) 19:38, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needed citations...