Dawkins couldn’t be more dull when he is playing the heretic. When he is excoriating heretics, on the other hand, he is sharp as a tack:
Misunderstanding Number One, which is also perpetrated by Wilson, is the fallacy that “Kin selection is a special, complex kind of natural selection, to be invoked only when the allegedly more parsimonious ‘standard Darwinian theory’ proves inadequate.” I hope I have made it clear that kin selection is logically entailed by standard Darwinian theory, even if the B and C terms work out in such a way that collateral kin are not cared for in practice. Natural selection without kin selection would be like Euclid without Pythagoras. Wilson is, in effect, striding around with a ruler, measuring triangles to see whether Pythagoras got it right. Kin selection was always logically implied by the neo-Darwinian synthesis. It just needed somebody to point it out—Hamilton did it.
Edward Wilson has made important discoveries of his own. His place in history is assured, and so is Hamilton’s. Please do read Wilson’s earlier books, including the monumental The Ants, written jointly with Bert Hölldobler (yet another world expert who will have no truck with group selection). As for the book under review, the theoretical errors I have explained are important, pervasive, and integral to its thesis in a way that renders it impossible to recommend. To borrow from Dorothy Parker, this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force. And sincere regret.
Cheap Talk 
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May 31, 2012 at 2:22 pm
Al
Jeff: and what are your thoughts on what I presume are the underlying repeated game arguments for group selection?
May 31, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Angry Dude
I heard a report on the criticism of Wilson, et al paper. Wilson’s co-author, Corina Tarnita, replied (paraphrased): I made an argument using mathematics, none of the criticism I Have heard is mathematical, I don’t feel compelled to respond until it is.
So, is Dawkins flailing away with erudite prose and flawed logic as is his habit, or has he addressed his argument in mathematics?
Btw, Dawkins’ book “the greatest show…” is a sorry example of intellectual rigor and honesty indeed. People in glass houses…
June 3, 2012 at 8:40 pm
Jason Collins (@jasonacollins)
Nowak and Tarnita’s responses to the criticism as not being mathematical enough is a bit disingenuous given the swathe of mathematical biologists that have responded to their paper. Discussion using language still carries information. The funny thing is, Wilson admits to not understanding the math himself.
June 4, 2012 at 12:06 pm
Enrique
The whole “inclusive fitness affair” appears to be another chapter or battle in the long-running “sociobiology wars”. Dawkins’s general point is that kin selection is one major mechanism for promoting cooperation among “selfish” genes, and even Martin Nowak, one of the co-authors of the Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson 2010 paper, still recognizes kin selection as such, but with some qualifications, in a recent 2012 paper he wrote for the Journal of Theoretical Biology introducing the subject of evolution of cooperation.
My problem with Nowak, et al., however, is that they argue that natural selection can explain cooperation just as well (but more parsimoniously) than kin selection theory can and that the “r” term in Hamilton’s rule superfluous. The problem with this is that they do not define “natural selection” in their paper (they can’t because natural selection is, in fact, not a single method but rather a collection of related mechanisms, such as direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, etc.). Also, if you read Nowak closely, you will see he always confuses the term “cooperation” with “altruism,” when in fact those are two different things. Although I admire Nowak and appreciate his mathematical or hyper-reductionist approach to evolution, at the end of the day, he is too sloppy in his use of terms for my taste, and his excessive reliance on mathematics is more a liability than an asset, because any mathematical model is always sensitive to its necessary (non-mathematical) assumptions, etc., etc.
June 9, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Walt
Dawkins’ is bullshitting here. He’s deliberately misconstruing the Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson argument. No one in the debate denies that natural selection has kin selection as a possible outcome. Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson are arguing that in practice people introduce kin selection in an ad-hoc fashion. They argue that this isn’t necessary, and that biologists should use properly grounded models, and that these models produce many other possible outcomes, such as group selection. In economics terminology, it’s an argument about microfoundations.
(Enrique’s comment is about 1 million times more on-point than Dawkins’.)