The False Allure of Group Selection

Does the human mind include psychological adaptations that were selected because they fostered the competitive advantage of ancestral groups, even if they harmed the individuals that bore those adaptations? This notion of group selection is the default folk theory of evolution among most nonbiologists, and even among many biologists until the 1960s, when the theory was shown to be at best improbable and at worst incoherent. Nonetheless group selection refuses to die, and has recently been endorsed by a few prominent biologists and anthropologists. I show that the intuitive appeal of group selection is based on multiple confusions. First, group psychology—the phenomenon in which people identify and make sacrifices for their group—should not be equated with group selection. Second, the size, power, influence, or geographic spread of a group over the course of history (the loose analogue of fitness in cultural evolution) is not analogous to an increase in the number of copies of a replicator in biological evolution. Finally, the appeal of group selection rests on an unexamined and highly implausible assumption: that the groups most victorious in violent combat were those that practiced the greatest degree of kindness and generosity within their own societies. I conclude that the theory of natural selection should be invoked in its rigorous sense of the differential representation of replicators across generations, and that “group selection” is a pernicious concept in evolutionary psychology, guaranteed to confuse. Keywords: group selection; altruism; cultural evolution; individual selection; inclusive fitness