preview

Multilevel Selection

Decent Essays

Multilevel selection (MLS)
Presently, the interest for selection of animal have been rejuvenated towards the theory of multilevel selection (Okasha, 2006; West et al. 2008; Gardner and Grafen, 2009; Nowak et al. 2010; Lion et al. 2011; Frank, 2013). From time being debate has been going on to whether or not selection can operate at multiple levels because of the confusion that arises due to the presence of weak individuals at the group levels but with respect to time the individual might show much stronger notion of adaptation at the different level (Wilson and Wilson, 2007; Gardner and Grafen, 2009). Although, now the social evolution theorists had also widely accepted that a covariance between group trait and fitness may arise due to response …show more content…

Animal breeder has considered it as a simple ‘aggregate’ of the traits of the group’s that is constituent by individuals, nevertheless some other scholars had imagination that group traits were often ‘emergent’ and might be undefined at the individual level (Salt, 1979; Grantham, 1995). Secondly, a similar type of ambiguity arises over the actual concept of group fitness. Typically, it has been defined that the group with greater number of daughter individuals would considered as most fittest group, however, an alternative approach clearly disagree the concept in the context of variable group size (Damuth and Heisler, 1988; Sober, 1993; Okasha, 2006; Rainey & Kerr, 2011). Lastly, there was a doubt regarding how to carry out the multilevel selection analysis, as multilevel selection 1 (MLS-1) was mostly responsible for describing the change in the frequencies of different types of individual and multilevel selection 2 (MLS-2) explained about the change in the frequencies of different types of groups (Michod, 2011; Rainey and Kerr, 2011). Moreover, MLS theory did not take care of the problems engaged with class structure, i.e., when different groups differ from others in terms of non-genetic reasons (West et al. 2008; Gardner and Grafen, 2009; Frank,

Get Access