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455The design argumentIn William Mann (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion, Blackwell. 2004.
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424Holism, Individualism, and the Units of SelectionPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980. 1980.Developing a definition of group selection, and applying that definition to the dispute in the social sciences between methodological holists and methodological individualists, are the two goals of this paper. The definition proposed distinguishes between changes in groups that are due to group selection and changes in groups that are artefacts of selection processes occurring at lower levels of organization. It also explains why the existence of group selection is not implied by the mere fact t…Read more
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35Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of HistoryPhilosophical Review 103 (1): 199. 1994.
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194Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciencesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4): 585-608. 1994.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 a…Read more
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10Problems for environmentalismIn Mohan Matthen & Christopher Stephens (eds.), Philosophy of Biology, Elsevier. pp. 144--365. 2007.
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"Comments on Maynard Smith's" How to model evolutionIn John Dupre (ed.), The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality, Mit Press. pp. 133--145. 1987.
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247Summary of: ‘Unto Others. The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior'Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (1-2): 185-206. 2000.The hypothesis of group selection fell victim to a seemingly devastating critique in 1960s evolutionary biology. In Unto Others (1998), we argue to the contrary, that group selection is a conceptually coherent and empirically well documented cause of evolution. We suggest, in addition, that it has been especially important in human evolution. In the second part of Unto Others, we consider the issue of psychological egoism and altruism -- do human beings have ultimate motives concerning the well-…Read more
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