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36Altruism, evolutionary psychology, and learningBehavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2): 281-282. 2002.Rachlin's substantive points about the relationship between altruism and self-control are obscured by simplistic and outdated portrayals of evolutionary psychology in relation to learning theory.
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113A critique of R.d. Alexander's views on group selectionBiology and Philosophy 14 (3): 431-449. 1999.Group selection is increasingly being viewed as an important force in human evolution. This paper examines the views of R.D. Alexander, one of the most influential thinkers about human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, on the subject of group selection. Alexander's general conception of evolution is based on the gene-centered approach of G.C. Williams, but he has also emphasized a potential role for group selection in the evolution of individual genomes and in human evolution. Alexander…Read more
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22Liberal and Conservative Protestant Denominations as Different Socioecological StrategiesHuman Nature 20 (1): 1-24. 2009.It is common to portray conservative and liberal Protestant denominations as “strong” and “weak” on the basis of indices such as church attendance. Alternatively, they can be regarded as qualitatively different cultural systems that coexist in a multiple-niche environment. We integrate these two perspectives with a study of American teenagers based on both one-time survey information and the experience sampling method (ESM), which records individual experience on a moment-by-moment basis. Conser…Read more
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389Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish BehaviorHarvard University Press. 1998.The authors demonstrate that unselfish behavior is in fact an important feature of both biological and human nature. Their book provides a panoramic view of altruism throughout the animal kingdom--from self-sacrificing parasites to the human capacity for selflessness--even as it explains the evolutionary sense of such behavior.
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14Reply to CommentariesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 711-727. 2002.The substance of the commentaries, however, reveals considerable disagreement about how UO conceptualizes the idea of group selection. Dennett describes the issues as “mind-twistingly elusive and slippery” and hints that it is mere hype to say that group selection has been revived. Barrett and Godfrey-Smith discuss the problem of multiple perspectives at length and claim that we are too liberal in our definition of groups. We believe that these criticisms obscure the simplicity of the basic ques…Read more
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42Perspectives and parameterizations commentary on Benjamin Kerr and Peter Godfrey-Smith's ``individualist and multi-level perspectives on selection in structured populations''Biology and Philosophy 17 (4): 529-537. 2002.We have two main objections to Kerr and Godfrey-Smith's (2002) meticulous analysis. First, they misunderstand the position we took in Unto Others – we do not claim that individual-level statements about the evolution of altruism are always unexplanatory and always fail to capture causal relationships. Second, Kerr and Godfrey-Smith characterize the individual and the multi-level perspectives in terms of different sets of parameters. In particular, they do not allow the multi-level perspective to…Read more
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30Authors' responseMetascience 10 (2): 202-208. 2001.We thank Karen Canfell, Hamish Spencer and Ben Oldroyd for their commentaries. Below are some comments on the points they raise: 1. Is the Group Selection Debate Merely a Matter of Semantics? 2. Multi-Level Selection Theory versus Genic Selectionism 3. Heritability and Group Selection in Human Beings 4. Adaptationism.
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420A critical review of philosophical work on the units of selection problemPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 534-555. 1994.The evolutionary problem of the units of selection has elicited a good deal of conceptual work from philosophers. We review this work to determine where the issues now stand
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11Group selection and “the pious gene”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (4): 782-787. 1996.The six commentaries raise five issues about multi-level selection theory that we attempt to address: (1) replicators without vehicles, (2) group selection and movement between groups, (3) absolute versus relative fitness, (4) group-level psychological adaptions, and (5) multi-level selection as a predictive theory.