In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.
 The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals.

Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences

Gru nd legung zur Metaphysik der Sitten

A Study of Concepts

Knowledge in Flux

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance of Homo sapiens as an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (i.e. wealth, success, and measured aptitudes) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology's central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change.

Social versus reproductive success: The central theoretical problem of human sociobiology

1: Introduction 2: The Realism Debate 3: Irrealism 4: Against Meaning Skepticism 5: Avoiding Strict Finitism 6: Meaning as Graspable 7: Truth as Knowable 8: Analyticity and Syntheticity 9: Finding the Right Logic 10: Cognitive Significance Regained 11: Defeasibility and Constructive Falsifiability

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The Taming of the True

The basic idea behind that account is that we need to distinguish straightforward inconsistency, or self-contradiction, of a set of assumptions, from paradoxicality. Both involve proofs of absurdity (1). But the proofs of absurdity in connection with straightforward contradictions are normalizable, whereas those in connection with paradoxes are not. Proofs are normalizable when they can be brought into normal form by a finite sequence of applications of reduction procedures. These reduction procedures are designed to get rid of unnecessary prolixity. Such prolixity can arise, most importantly, by applying an introduction rule for a logical operator and then immediately applying the corresponding elimination rule. The result is a sentence occurrence within the proof standing as the conclusion of an application of the introduction rule and as the major premiss of an application of the corresponding elimination rule. Reductions get rid of such 'maximal' sentence occurrences, which stand as unwanted 'knuckles' in the proof. The reduction procedures for the logical operators are designed to eliminate such unnecessary detours within proofs.1

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On paradox without self-reference

Anti-realism and logic

Philosophy, Evolution, and Human Nature

Anti-realism is a doctrine about logic, language, and meaning with roots in the work of Wittgenstein and Frege. In this book, the author clarifies Dummett's case for anti-realism and develops his arguments further. He concludes by advocating a radical reform of our logical practices.

Neil Tennant

Papers

The Taming of the True

On paradox without self-reference

Anti-realism and logic

Philosophy, Evolution, and Human Nature

Anti-Realism and Logic: Truth as Eternal