From: "Paul Marsden" <PaulMarsden@msn.com>
To: "memetics" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: Rethinking Group Selection
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 11:33:15 +0100
My claim is that Wilson and Sober's so-called radical position on human
group selection
(e.g. Hutterites) is an uncontroversial tautology, and it is a misnomer to
call
it group selection.
1. Non-genetically transmitted information (culture) can affect the survival
chances of an individual.
2. Social groups are defined in terms of a set of non-genetically
information they have appropriated
3. Therefore culture shared by individuals (i.e. a group) when it affects
survival chances, results in the 'selection' of those individuals, and this
is group selection only insofar as groups are defined in terms of that
culture.
All they are saying is that culture affects survival chances, and this is
not controversial, and certainly not group selection in any non-trivial
sense.
Paul Marsden
Graduate Research Centre in the Social Sciences
University of Sussex
e-mail PaulMarsden@msn.com
tel/fax (44) (0) 117 974 1279
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission:
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/
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