Abstract
We have two main objections to Kerr and Godfrey-Smith's (2002) meticulous analysis. First, they misunderstand the position we took in Unto Others – we do not claim that individual-level statements about the evolution of altruism are always unexplanatory and always fail to capture causal relationships. Second, Kerr and Godfrey-Smith characterize the individual and the multi-level perspectives in terms of different sets of parameters. In particular, they do not allow the multi-level perspective to use the individual fitness parameters αi and βi. We don't see why the multi-level perspective prevents one from thinking in these terms. Kerr and Godfrey-Smith's argument that Uyenoyama and Feldman's (1980, 1992) definition of altruism belongs more to the individualist perspective than it does to the multi-level perspective is an artifact of their choice of parameters; the same point applies to their argument about the individualism inherent in the idea of Class I and Class II fitness structures.
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References
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Sober, E., Wilson, D.S. Perspectives and Parameterizations Commentary on Benjamin Kerr and Peter Godfrey-Smith's ``Individualist and Multi-Level Perspectives on Selection in Structured Populations'' . Biology & Philosophy 17, 529–537 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020575531347
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020575531347