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

This is Part II of a two-part study of the foundations of mathematics through the lenses of (i) apriority and analyticity, and (ii) the resources supplied by Core Logic. [In Part I we explained what is meant by apriority, as the notion applies to knowledge and possibly also to truths in general. We distinguished grounds for

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Logic, Mathematics, and the A Priori, Part II: Core Logic as Analytic, and as the Basis for Natural Logicism

Given the harmony principle for logical operators, compositionality ought to ensure that harmony should obtain at the level of whole contents. That is, the role of a content qua premise ought to be balanced exactly by its role as a conclusion. Frege's contextual definition of propositional content happens to exploit this balance, and one appeals to the Cut rule to show that the definition is adequate. We show here that Frege's definition remains adequate even when one relevantizes logic by abandoning an unrestricted Cut rule. The proof exploits the fact that in the relevantized logic, which abandons the unrestricted rule of Cut, any failure of the transitivity of deduction is offset by the epistemic gain involved in learning that a stronger-than-expected result holds.

Frege's content-principle and relevant deducibility

Inferentialism is explained as an attempt to provide an account of meaning that is more sensitive (than the tradition of truth-conditional theorizing deriving from Tarski and Davidson) to what is learned when one masters meanings. The logically reformist inferentialism of Dummett and Prawitz is contrasted with the more recent quietist inferentialism of Brandom. Various other issues are highlighted for inferentialism in general, by reference to which different kinds of inferentialism can be characterized. Inferentialism for the logical operators is explained, with special reference to the Principle of Harmony. The statement of that principle in the author’s book Natural Logic is fine-tuned here in the way obviously required in order to bar an interesting would-be counterexample furnished by Crispin Wright, and to stave off any more of the same. ∗To appear in ed. Alex Miller, Essays for Crispin Wright: Logic, Language and Mathematics (in preparation for Oxford University Press: Volume 2 of a two-volume Festschrift for Crispin Wright, co-edited with Annalisa Coliva). Discussions with Tadeusz Szubka prompted a more detailed examination of Brandom’s inferentialism, and its points of contrast with Dummett’s. Thanks are owed to Salvatore Florio for an extremely careful reading of an earlier draft, which resulted in significant improvements. Robert Kraut was generous with his time and expertise on a later draft. Two referees for Oxford University Press provided helpful comments, which led to considerable expansion. The author is fully responsible for any defects that remain.

Inferentialism, Logicism, Harmony, and a Counterpoint

Brian Skyrms has studied the evolutionary dynamics of a simple bargaining game. Fair-dealing is the strategy 'demand 1/2', competing with the more modest strategy 'demand 1/3' and the greedier strategy 'demand 2/3'. Individuals leave offspring in proportion to their accumulated payoffs. The rules for payoffs from encounters penalize low- and high-demanders. The result is a significant basin of attraction for fair-dealing as an evolutionarily stable strategy. From these considerations Skyrms concludes that a disposition to fair-dealing could have evolved. A very different picture emerges, however, when one considers genetic bases for the dispositions involved. A simple two-allele sexual model produces very different stable equilibria in the distribution of behavioral phenotypes. The equilibria for Skyrms's purely phenotypic selection process will not in general be attainable once one enters some simple genetic considerations.

Sex and the Evolution of Fair-Dealing

The theories of natural science, and especially what we call natural laws, have the logical form of strictly universal statements; thus they can be expressed in the form of negations of strictly existential statements or, as we may say, in the form of nonexistence statements (or 'there-is-not' statements). . . . In this formulation we see that natural laws . . . insist on the non-existence of certain things or states of affairs, proscribing or prohibiting, as it were, these things or states of affairs: they rule them out. And it is precisely because they do this that they arefalsifiable. If we accept as true one singular statement which, as it were, infringes the prohibition by asserting the existence of a thing (or the occurrence of an event) ruled out by the law, then the law is refuted.

Neil Tennant

Papers

Logic, Mathematics, and the A Priori, Part II: Core Logic as Analytic, and as the Basis for Natural Logicism

Frege's content-principle and relevant deducibility

Inferentialism, Logicism, Harmony, and a Counterpoint

Sex and the Evolution of Fair-Dealing

Minimal logic is adequate for popperian science