Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection

by Mark E. Borrello

Much of the history of the evolutionary debate since Darwin has focused on the level at which natural selection occurs. Most biologists acknowledge multiple levels of selection—from the gene, the trait, and the organism, to the family, the group, and  the species. However, it is the debate about group selection that Mark E. Borrello focuses on in Evolutionary Restraints.

            Tracing the history of biological attempts to determine whether selection could lead to the evolution of fitter groups, Borrello takes as his focus the British naturalist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, who proposed that animals could regulate their own population levels and thereby avoid overexploitation of their food and other resources. By the mid-twentieth century, Wynne-Edwards became the primary advocate for group selection theory, and precipitated a debate that engaged the most significant evolutionary biologists including Ernst Mayr, John Maynard Smith, G.C. Williams and Richard Dawkins. The resultant interpretations and arguments bled out into broader conversations about population regulation, environmental crises, and the evolution of human and animal social behavior. Evolutionary Restraints illuminates both the process of science and the role of controversy in the process. From its origins in Darwin’s own thinking, this debate, Borrello reminds us, remains relevant and alive to this day.

Genres: Evolution

215 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2010

Reviews

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am most interested in understanding knowledge formation - how do we know what we know? Why do we believe certain things and not others? How can our experience be shaped by learning and in what was does learning reciprocally change what we experience? On a more specific level I want to understand better the relationship between scientific research and cultural, political, and economic forces. The questions we ask, how we ask them, and what we do with the answers we find can never be isolated from the context of who we are, when we are, and how we perceive the world and our purpose within it.

I picked up Borrello's book hoping to learn more about how the social spread and interpretation of Darwinian evolution influenced and was influenced by political, cultural, and economic factors. I was not disappointed!

While tying in Darwinian theory and its application to social understandings, Borrello's work focuses on analyzing the cultural context in which the theory of Group Selection was first proposed by the naturalist Wynne-Edwards. In addition to Natural selection as an evolutionary restraint, Group Selection is defined by Wynne-Edwards as an important aspect of evolutionary development on populations/species. However, Borrello points out that Wynne-Edwards' theory had difficulty gaining traction in Western Society, while in Russian and other academic circles it influenced new intellectual pursuits. W.E.'s own lack of charisma and unpopularity within his academic community played a large role in how his research was received, as Borrello points ultimately to how scientific research can never be purely set apart from the context in which it is presented. Importantly, "Wynne-Edwards may have diminished his own professional status as a result of his steadfast insistence on the importance of group selection, but he helped create the theoretical space where subsequent researchers could develop more careful analyses" (125).

Borrello poses many interesting questions: "To what extent was Darwin's work an echo of the Victorian capitalist ethos?" (14) My immediate interest is then to understand to what extent the Victorian capitalist ethos was shaped by post-Darwinian thought? How did Darwinian theories influence the development of modern capitalism?

This research presents a thought-provoking dive into how the applications of evolutionary theory not only influence individual social perspectives, but how research itself is influenced by culture, politics, and time, asks the readers to recognize that only a multi-level analyses of evolution (not only an individual-level explanation) can bring continuously accurate evolutionary understanding.