Robert Tulip wrote: That is just how I see it, perhaps intuitively. I would welcome being informed as to why this is wrong according to the 140 scientists, or if I am missing something essential. Dawkins notes the dangers of invoking authority in such a debate, but still I’m reminded of what Einstein said in a similar situation - "if I were wrong, then one would have been enough".

I'm trying to do a little more reading on the subject, because I don't think it's a case where the minority should just be dismissed.

A few things that Pinker said in that piece I didn't find completely convincing, but overall I found it persuasive.

To take a different quote from Pinker but making the same point as the one from above:

It's more accurate to say that groups of individuals that are organized beat groups of selfish individuals. And effective organization for group conflict is more likely to consist of more powerful individuals incentivizing and manipulating the rest of their groups than of spontaneous individual self-sacrifice.

And once again, it won't work to switch levels and say that group selection is really acting on the norms and institutions of successful states. The problem is that this adds nothing to the conventional historian's account in which societies with large tax bases, strong governments, seductive ideologies, and effective military forces expanded at the expense of their neighbors.

I don't think anyone is claiming that only "incentivizing and manipulating" accounts for self-sacrifice (Haidt would surely object to that), but I think what initially seems plausible as group conflict having evolutionary consequences may not stand up to scrutiny.

I think if the anti-group side says, well you have to solve the free rider problem, that by itself is not definitive (nor is it definitive to point out that genes are the replicators, as Jerry Coyne points out in the piece quoted below). But the group theory has to explain how a trait that is detrimental to the individual but good for the group survives. Is it really enough to say that if the group survives then the trait survives? That seems an awfully precarious way for those genes to replicate (which is ultimately the issue).

Dawkins’s (and my) beef with group selection as a way to evolve traits that are bad for individuals but good for groups is that this form of selection is inefficient, subject to subversion within groups, and, especially, that there’s virtually no evidence that this form of selection has been important in nature. http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com ... -it-again/

David Sloan Wilson, whom Coyne harshly criticizes, in turn slams Coyne and says group selection is not a minority view. I'm afraid I'm not knowledgable enough to say: http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/2011/ ... selection/