Mick Hartley

Let’s go back to the beginning and build a new field-wide consensus based on the fact that selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups, and everything else is commentary.

David Sloan Wilson, one of the original proponents of group selection theory, aka multi-level selection theory, writes in Seed on evolution, selfishness, and altruism:

Regardless of what Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling may have thought, selfish gene theory does not predict that individuals are invariably selfish. Richard Dawkins has repeatedly made this point and his rowing crew metaphor illustrates the idea of selfish genes pulling together to collectively survive and reproduce. On the other hand, Dawkins is frankly inconsistent on this subject, frequently implying that it is a dog-eat-dog world at the individual level after all. […]

The idea that evolution explains selfishness well and altruism poorly is so dead that it is beginning to smell. Can we please bury it now? {…]

Darwin clearly understood the fundamental problem associated with the evolution of altruism: It is locally disadvantageous. Place an altruist and a selfish individual next to each other and the selfish individual wins. How can a behavior evolve in the total population when it is never at a local advantage?

Darwin also clearly understood the nature of the solution: Altruism is advantageous at a larger scale. Groups of altruists out-compete groups of non-altruists, even if altruism is selectively disadvantageous within each group. This is the theory of multilevel selection, in which different traits are favored at different levels. The term multilevel selection wasn’t coined until later, but the whole point of group selection theory was to solve the problem posed by a conflict between levels of selection.

He's not a man troubled by doubts – only by the length of time it's taken for people to realise that he's been right all along:

Next year will mark the 35th anniversary of my first publication on group selection. Such a protracted controversy over such a simple set of issues is not normal science. I therefore started to write a series of blogposts titled “Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection” that expands the scope to consider social and cultural factors, in addition to the conceptual issues.

The blog format should not disguise my serious intent. The group selection controversy requires a truth and reconciliation process in the same way that protracted political controversies do. The resulting new consensus will lead to a much simpler and more productive understanding of altruism and selfishness in the future.