The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of Group Selectionism

One of the most vigorous controversies in twentieth-century evolutionary biology concerns the question of whether selection operates on groups of organisms. Although explanations of biological phenomena in terms of ‘the good of the group’ were common in the scientific literature prior to the 1960s, by the end of the decade such explanations had been abolished from evolutionary biology. Nonetheless, group selectionism has made a remarkable comeback in the last two decades. This article reviews some of the history of this debate, and then considers the contemporary status of group selectionism.