On Group Selection And Methodological Individualism – A Reply To Douglas Glen Whitman

According to Whitman, Hayek’s conception of MI pertains just to the relationship of individual psychology and the social sciences, and is neutral on broader questions about reductionism in other scientific domains. Since hypotheses of group selection frequently concern organisms that are taken to be mindless (e.g. viruses and social insects), it is clear that they do not come into contact with MI thus construed. And even when group selection hypotheses make claims abouthumanevolution, as do the hypotheses we discuss in Chapters 4 and 5 ofUnto Others, there is, once again, a relationship of mutual irrelevance. The reason is that MI addresses what biologists call the question of proximate mechanism, whereas hypotheses about natural selection are part of the project of ultimate explanation (Mayr, 1961). An example used inUnto Othershelps to illustrate this distinction. If one asks why sunflowers turn towards the sun, there are two ways in which this question might be understood. One might wish to understand how the machinery inside of each plant causes the plant to exhibit phototropism. Or one might want to understand the evolutionary processes that caused this behavior to evolve. Both types of understanding are important, and there is no conflict between them. By the same token, when a human society exhibits some property – e.g. the type of egalitarianism among adult males thatBoehm (1999)argues is characteristic of nomadic hunter-gatherers – we might seek both a proximate and an ultimate explanation of that arrangement. MI constrains the former problem; it asserts that a group’s having that property must be understood in terms of the beliefs and desires of the individuals in the group (with properties of the physical environment brought in where necessary). But even if the question of proximate mechanism gets answered in the way that MI insists, the question is left open as to whether the group phenotype is the result of natural selection, and if it is, whether group selection was involved. MI says nothing about the form that an evolutionary explanation must take; it concerns proximate explanation only.