huckturner{at}hotmail.com (Huck Turner) wrote in
news:c3kugf$abk$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> jimmenegay{at}sbcglobal.net (Jim Menegay) wrote in message
> news:... 

>> 4.  Sometimes, the argument over levels of selection is a matter of
>> taste rather than substance.  You can certainly apply a kind of
>> reductionism to study selection at the lowest possible level.  Your
>> low-level models may be mathematically equivalent to a higher level
>> model.  The question is which kind of math you prefer - which set of
>> equations provides the most insight.  In my limited experience, the
>> best insights are provided by looking at a phenomenon from multiple
>> viewpoints.  Hamilton's rb>c can be derived at either the gene level,
>> the individual level, or a Price-style group level.  Which is best? 
>> Well, the gene-level strikes me as most intuitive, but it isn't as
>> good at revealing the trade-off between the within-group and the
>> between-group effects as the Price approach.  The view from the
>> individual level is the most thorny, involving the wierd notion of
>> "inclusive fitness".  But, IMHO, the effort one expends
in puzzling
>> out these strange accounting rules is well worth the effort. There is
>> a subtraction of fitness that is received but not "earned" and an
>> adding back in of fitness earned, but not received.  Once you
>> understand the logic, you see applications of the trick to other
>> problems. 
 
> I see no problem with talking about selection at different levels if
> it is just a methodological convenience. It is the more substantial
> claims that I'm not so convinced by, the claims that group, species
> and individual level theories account for data that cannot in
> principle be explained by gene level theories.

Sorry for the delay in responding - I have been sidetracked by other 
discussions.

While I am willing to entertain the idea of multiple levels of selection, 
I also would like to see more examples of higher level selection.With 
this in mine, I would like to note a mention by Wilson in "Sociobiology" 
of something I had previously noted - a lot of animals don't spend all 
that much time working hard at surviving. If you watch the animal 
specials, you note that many animals spend a lot of time doing nothing. 

Wilson's explanation is that this represents a form of group selection: 
if the animals were working hard to survive during normal times, they 
would starve when times got bad. But there are some problems with this. 
One would think that an animal that hustled all the time during good 
times and bad would still outcompete the one that only hustled during bad 
times. Wilson falls back on the argument that populations with boom and 
bust cycles are more likely to go extinct than stable populations - 
basically species level selection. But some species have survived for 
many millions of years - why don't they continually tend to revert to 
boom and bust behavior if that is favored by individual selection?


Now part of the explanation may lie in the "worst year in ten" effect. 
That is, there is sufficient variation in conditions that "bad" years 
will occur several times during an animal's typical life span. In that 
case I would think you would see a higher level of "hustle" in animals 
with a shorter life span, and that may in fact be true - I am not enough 
of a naturalist to know (note that this is different from the higher 
metabolic rate seen in small animals due to scaling effects).

Yours,

Bill Morse 


Note Wilson's explanation of a point I had previously raised - most 
animals do not spend all their time working hard at surviving. Why not? 
If due to worst year in ten, how does this get passed on to short term 
species.
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