PHL357H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Methodological Individualism, 2-Step Garage, Heritability
Document Summary
Group selection helps altruism because groups depend on altruism to move forward and gain more fitness. Eg: donations of fitness increase altruistics group fitness but those donations also decrese their own individual fitness. This donation also increases the fitness of the selfish person. Dialect: step 1: altruistic groups exits but its evolutionary bad, step 2: but the average of the fitness is higher than the individual group. Different genotypes (high permeance and low rate of endogenous change = heritability- maybe) = different phenotypes (neither permenant or endogenously stable) Step 1: environment acts on selection which acts on phenotypes and they get chosen. Williams rejects group selection because they don"t remain unchanged long enough for something to be selected. Furthermore, there cant be a 2-step structure (above) because theres no group genes: it"d be based on individual genes. Williams basically said that we should use as few assumptions as possible and basically wanted us to explain group characteristics by individual characteristics.
