Humans form effective, coordinated, division-of-labor groupings at several levels of aggregation. At each level, there is a problem of metasystem transition. At each level, there is not only competition between other groupings at the same level, but also competition between the interests of the smaller incorporated units and the interests of the larger encompassing unit. Primary, face-to-face, groups are incorporated into organized city-states, and these into nations. A plausible node of selection and inter-organization competition can be envisaged at each of these levels. The great majority of evolutionary biologists deny the efficacy of biological group selection of those "altruistic" traits in which individuals act for the preservation of the group at the risk of their own well being and "inclusive fitness" (i.e., the representation of their own genes in future generations). This is not to deny the occurrence of group selection, but rather to say that its effects for self-sacrificial altruistic traits will be undermined by individual-vs.-individual selection. A group with heroically self-sacrificing altruists may thrive better. The inclusive fitness gains from this will be shared equally by the non-altruists within the group. For the altruists, these gains are in part undermined by the risks they run. The non-altruists pay no such costs, and thus out-breed the self-sacrificial altruists in the within-group genetic competition. (For the soldiers, etc., of the social insects, this intra-social-organization genetic competition has been eliminated by the sterility of each of the cooperating castes).
Our previous position accepted the following:
This simple point of view we are now ready to substantially modify for social control mechanisms within primary groups, retaining its relevance for secondary groups. One influence is the increased plausibility of biological group selection as seen by evolutionary biologists (cf. Wilson and Sober, 1994). All along, biological evolution has been credited for the human capacity for culture, including competent communication of useful information between individuals. But even in much less social animals, social communication creates a niche for self-serving deception, and biological group selection may be needed to keep the rate of such parasitism low enough so that there is a net collective communicative advantage. The resulting proximal mechanisms would include mutual monitoring and retaliation for "immoral" behavior (an analogue for the mutual enforcement of sterility among the social insect castes). We humans probably have an innate fear of ostracism, and a tendency to find painful the signs of hostility on the part of those we work or live with on a regular face-to-face basis. Innate tendencies to enforce group solidarity on others would be supported by both individual and group selection and may be identified as prerequisite for group selection.
The route to a cultural-evolutionary group selection that had been proposed contained several stages that built upon biologically evolved bases (Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Campbell, 1983, 1991). While these are presented as advantageous at the individual selection level, they are both plausible routes to biological group selection and might require group selection to avoid free rider parasitism and elimination by the negative costs of the self-sacrificial altruism they produce:
Even if biological group selection has occurred in human evolution, the persistence of genetic competition among the cooperators has produced a profoundly ambivalent social animal, in sharp contrast with the sterile castes of the social insects. For humans in social organizations, organizational optimizing is in continuous conflict with optimizing individual well-being and inclusive fitness. In parallel, primary group social solidarity competes with secondary group optimization in industrial and governmental bureaucracies.
Mis à jour le 01/04/2016 pratclif.com