category: Biology
The Descent of Edward Wilson
Author: Richard Dawkins
Source: Prospect Magazine
The Social Conquest of Earth
By Edward O Wilson
(WW Norton, £18.99, May)
When he received the manuscript of The Origin of Species, John Murray, the publisher, sent it to a referee who suggested that Darwin should jettison all that evolution stuff and concentrate on pigeons. It’s funny in the same way as the spoof review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which praised its interesting “passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways of controlling vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper” but added:
“Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book can not take the place of JR Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.”
I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. In particular, Wilson now rejects “kin selection” (I shall explain this below) and replaces it with a revival of “group selection”—the poorly defined and incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of whole groups of organisms.
Read more at
Prospect Magazine
Comments
Post: May 25 2012 4:20 pm By: Tim Tyler
Edward Wilson doesn’t understand kin and group selection. However, as this article makes pretty clear, Richard Dawkins doesn’t understand it either.
Dawkins and Wilson should both read some of the more recent work uniting kin and group selection.