sir_toejam
Posts: 846
Joined: April 2005
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hmm, i think you are unintentionally grouping where you shouldn't.
perhaps another question would make it clearer:
How would you characterize the lion vs. hyena encounter?
occassionally, a large group of hyenas can wipe out a small pride of lions from an area as they compete for food and living space. sometimes vice versa.
monkeys fight other monkey species that overlap in home range and/or resources.
maybe you prefer more human examples like tribal warfare?
simple competition bewteen individuals, who may or may not travel in groups.
two similar species like the two hominids you mention would likely overlap in resource utilization at some point; especially if large scale climate changes caused one group to migrate into the other's normal area.
It's still considered selection at an individual by individual level.
If this isn't clear, we could go into more of what was meant by the old concept of species selection, before the more modern interpretation of individual selection was adopted if you like.
I believe that this also is covered somewhere in the TO archives.
do a search on "species selection" and see what pops up.
bottom line:
the reason individual selection is favored over species selection is both theoretical (check out the history of game theory), and observational (we've never observed any instance of selection acting at the species level).
moreover, the species selection idea can get confusing, as the idea of species and/or population level selection existed long before Gould, was rejected and then resurrected by Gould in a slightly different incarnation.
So far as I know, that too has been rejected. I have yet to see any evidence presented since Gould to support it.
(hence my surprise at seeing it mentioned, and me wondering if I missed something)
as to this:
| Quote | | I'm still waiting for Skeptic, or someone, to point me to a reference documenting the demise of PE |
IIRC, it was more a consesus after much debate that PE didn't actually fit either the theoretical models, northe current observational data, and ever more recent transitional discoveries in the fossil record were also not terribly supportive.
Wes would know better than I if there was a seminal reference during this time period that signified this.
bottom line though, it was simply a matter of parsimony; PE while a well thought out hypothesis, when rigorously examined against current and more recent evidence, simply wasn't needed. I don't think it ever was "disproven" per sae, just kinda shoved to the back burner.
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