Passage A
The orthodox view of evolutionary biology, championed since the mid-twentieth century, posits that natural selection operates primarily at the level of the individual or, more precisely, the gene. According to this framework of inclusive fitness, behaviors that appear altruistic—such as a worker bee sacrificing its life to protect the hive or a ground squirrel sounding an alarm call that attracts predators to itself—are ultimately self-serving. The organism is acting to ensure the survival of its close relatives, thereby propagating the shared genetic material it possesses. In this view, evolutionary success is measured strictly by the transmission of genes to the next generation. Consequently, any behavioral trait that diminishes an individual's own reproductive success in favor of non-relatives will be swiftly and mercilessly eliminated by natural selection. What we intuitively categorize as "altruism" is, from an evolutionary standpoint, merely genetic selfishness operating in disguise.
Passage B
Recent developments in multi-level selection theory have challenged the strict gene-centric orthodoxy of the past several decades. Theorists argue that while individual-level selection invariably favors selfish traits, selection can also operate simultaneously at the level of the group. In highly social species, a cohesive group composed of cooperative individuals will frequently outcompete and gradually replace a group composed primarily of selfish individuals. This dynamic implies that behavioral traits which are disadvantageous to the individual organism can nevertheless proliferate within a population, provided they offer a significant competitive advantage to the group as a whole. When a population is divided into competing groups, the evolutionary success of the collective can override the individual disadvantage of an altruistic act. Thus, genuine evolutionary altruism—where an organism incurs a true fitness cost to benefit the collective without requiring direct genetic relatedness—is not a statistical illusion. It is, instead, a robust biological phenomenon driven by the differential success of competing populations.
Based on the framework presented in Passage A, the author of Passage A would argue that the proliferation of "cooperative traits" described in Passage B is possible only if the individuals within the successful cooperative groups share a substantial degree of genetic relatedness.
Cevap: Cevap