Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece

Why Evolution is True “Did human social behavior evolve via group selection? E. O. Wilson defends that view in the NYT”

Anyone who reads my posts here has learned that I find Jerry Coyne’s general tone to be really annoying and that I am predisposed to entertain group selective explanations of human behavior. But with that said, I need to point out that cooperation is a serious theoretical dilemma if you do not allow some kind of grouping to occur. When Coyne suggests that natural selection acting solely on the individual can explain all of the features of human sociality, he is really misrepresenting the theoretical literature, which suggests that the composition of the group to which you belong is critical. Sometimes this group composition is based on kinship, but it does not have to be. Allow a bunch of individuals to freely move about without any group structure and cooperation will not evolve. This is what the original 1960’s-era ‘refutation’ of group selection taught us: if you assume sufficient migration, mixing, homogeneity, cooperation cannot evolve.

E.O. Wilson is probably a bit premature in his certain declarations about humans evolving by multilevel selection. For this reason, he and Martin Nowak are far from blameless for this controversy: they over-stated their hand, and now there has been a backlash. But let us not lose sight of the fact that neither side has a good answer to how so much cooperation in humans evolved. I just think that we need to at least entertain group selection as a possible mechanism.