Social Environment Construction Provides an Adaptive Explanation for New Levels of Individuality
Year: 2009
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: During a major transition, former free-living entities relinquish their own individuality and aggregate into groups, such that the group becomes an evolutionary individual in its own right (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry, 1995; Michod, 1999). Essential to this process is cooperation, for the group members must cooperate to contribute to the success of the higher-level unit, rather than pursue independent, competitive, inter-ests. While it is well-known from social evolution theory that population structure can promote such cooperation (Hamilton, 1964; Wilson, 1975), little attention has been paid to how such structure can itself arise via adaptive evolutionary mechanisms. We postulate here a process by which selection on individual environment-modifying traits can create conditions favourable for the evolution of cooperation, and, in ex-treme cases, for a transition to a new level of individuality. We term such processes, by which an individual evolves an influence over with whom it interacts, “social environ-ment construction”, which can be viewed as a type of niche construction (Odling-Smee et al., 2003). To support this argument, we have developed a two-locus model in which a trait
Institution: University of Southampton
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1593995375