Levels of selection: An alternative to individualism in biology and the human sciences

Abstract

Biology and many branches of the human sciences are dominated by an individualistic tradition that treat groups and communities as collections of organisms without themselves having the properties implicit in the word organism. In biology, the individualistic tradition achieves generality only by defining self-interest as “anything that evolves by natural selection”. A more meaningful definition of self-interest shows that natural selection operates on a hierarchy of units from genetic elements to multi-species communities, and that a unit becomes organismic to the degree that natural selection operates at the level of that unit. I review levels-of-selection theory in biology and sketch a parallel argument for the human sciences.