Community-level evolutionary processes: Linking community genetics with replicator-interactor theory

Abstract

Understanding community-level selection using Lewontin’s criteria requires both community-level inheritance and community-level heritability, and in the discipline of community and ecosystem genetics, these are often conflated. While there are existing studies that show the possibility of both, these studies impose community-level inheritance as a product of the experimental design. For this reason, these experiments provide only weak support for the existence of community-level selection in nature. By contrast, treating communities as interactors (in line with Hull’s replicator-interactor framework or Dawkins’s idea of the “extended phenotype”) provides a more plausible and empirically supportable model for the role of ecological communities in the evolutionary process.