Jump to content

Unit of selection

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Pgallagher (talk | contribs) at 05:01, 3 September 2007 (→‎Selection at the level of the gene). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A unit of selection is a biological entity within the hierarchy of biological organisation (e.g. genes, cells, individuals, groups, species) that is subject to natural selection. For several decades there has been intense debate among evolutionary biologists about the extent to which evolution has been shaped by selective pressures acting at these different levels. This debate has been as much about what it means to be a unit of selection as it has about the relative importance of the units themselves, i.e., is it group or individual selection that has driven the evolution of altruism? When it is noted that altruism reduces the fitness of individuals, it is difficult to see how altruism has evolved within the context of Darwinian selection acting on individuals; see Kin selection.

Examples of selection at each level

Below, cases of selection at the genic, cellular, individual and group level from within the multi-level selection perspective are presented and discussed.

Selection at the level of the gene

Main article: gene-centered view of evolution

George C. Williams in his influential book Adaptation and Natural Selection was one of the first to present a gene-centered view of evolution with the gene as the unit of selection, arguing that a unit of selection should exhibit a high degree of permanence.

Richard Dawkins has written several books popularizing and expanding the idea. According to Dawkins, genes cause phenotypes and a gene is 'judged' by its phenotypic effects. Dawkins distinguishes entities which survive or fail to survive ("replicators") from entities with temporary existence that interact directly with the environment ("vehicles"). Genes are "replicators" whereas individuals and groups of individuals are "vehicles". Dawkins argues that, although they are both aspects of the same process, "replicators" rather than "vehicles" should be preferred as units of selection. This is because replicators, owing to their permanence, should be regarded as the ultimate beneficiaries of adaptations. Genes are replicators and therefore the gene is the unit of selection.

Critics of Dawkins, such as philosopher of biology Elliot Sober, have rejected the gene as a universal unit of selection by emphasizing the causal mechanisms of selection. A unit of selection, according to Sober, is an entity whose properties cause differential reproduction. In this case the causes of one and the same selection process could, in some instances, be correctly described at different levels in the biological hierarchy. However, according to Sober, this does not generally apply at the genic level. Sober argues that a gene's phenotypic effects can depend on context. If a gene increases reproductive success in one context but lowers it in another it has no such thing as an overall causal role.

A straightforward argument against the gene being the unit of selection is offered by Sober and Richard Lewontin in "Artifact, Cause, and Genic Selection," reprinted in Sober, ed., Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology.

Consider heterozygote superiority. If you specify the selection coefficients of individual genes, their values will vary as the population changes in gene frequency. In contrast, the selection coefficients of individual genotypes remain constant. One therefore loses the ability to think of selection as a force, as the cause of differences of fitness. Models of selfish genes can produce the same results as models of selection acting at a higher level, but one loses the concept of selection as a force and as a cause of evolution, rather than just a measure of a propensity to change.

As an illustration, let p be the frequency of dominant allele A and q be the frequency of recessive allele a, where p + q = 1. Let w1 be the fitness of AA, w2 the fitness of Aa, and w3 the fitness of aa. Before selection, the population will contain AA, Aa, and aa in the proportion, p^2:2pq:q^2. The average fitness of the population will be p^2w1 + 2pgw2 + q^2w3. The population will move toward a stable equilibrium frequency p' = (w3 - w2) / ( (w1 - w2) + (w3 - w2)).

Try this with genic selection. If one wants to determine the fitness of the individual allele A, W.A, one calculates that W.A * frequency of A before selection = frequency of A after selection * average fitness. Frequency of a before selection is p, after selection it is w3p^2 + w2pq / W. Hence, W.A = w1p + w2q. Similarly, W of the recessive allele a = w3q + w2p.

Hence, the fitness of single genes is the just the average of the fitness values of the genotype, weighted by the frequency of their occurrence in the genotype.

The fitness of the each of the three genotypes, AA, Aa, and aa, are constants. They do not change as the population reaches equilibrium. But the fitness of individuals genes does change constantly as their frequency changes. Whereas the fitness of the genotypes has a real relationship to the viability of the organism, the fitness of each individual allele does not. One can calculate the fitness of alleles if one knows the fitness of the genotype, but one cannot in general calculate the fitness of the genotype from the fitness values of the alleles. The selfish genes model leads to a lost of information.

For example, assume the homozygotes are lethal. The equilibrium frequency of each allele will be 0.5. Before selection, the three genotypes will be in the proportion, 1/4, 1/2, 1/4. After selection, 0, 1, 0. When they reproduce, the population will return to 1/4, 1/2, 1/4, then selection will occur and return the population to 0, 1, 0. And so on and so on. But according to the selfish gene model, at equilibrium the fitness values of both genes are 1, and their selection coefficients are therefore 0. Therefore, the selfish gene model provides no means for explaining why the zig-zag occurs! According to the genic selection model, selection is not happening at equilibrium! We have lost the concept of selection as something external to fitness. Genic selection also provides no model of heterozygote superiority, since it measures only the fitness of individual alleles, and can't tell us that the diploid genotype is superior.

Sober and Lewontin go on to provide examples of where selfish genes - genic selection - might occur: they mention that chromosomes in the house mouse that contain the t-allele have an increased chance of being represented in the sperm pool of heterozygous mice. The t-allele might be thought of as a selfish gene at this level. Also, dominant alleles that are always lethal, and phenotypic traits that are controlled by a single locus where the heterozygote is intermediate in fitness between the two homozygotes, could be modeled using genic selection.

But whenever the fitness of a gene depends on what's present at some other locus, the selection coefficient of individual alleles will be the average over all genetic contexts, and - most importantly - they will change as the population evolves.

Sober and Lewontin argue that genic selection will be rare, since the fitness of alleles often depends on the presence or absence of other alleles. They discuss chromosome inversions in the grass-hopper Moraba scura, and in general point out that many models of stabilizing selection depend on the fitness of individual loci being determined by the presence of other genes.

Another argument made in Sterelny, Kim and Paul E. Griffiths Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology is that gene interaction isn't the only problem for genic selection. Consider that two alleles could have the same phenotypic effect: if A and B are distinct alleles and they both can make difference X in the organism, is it not more sensible to say X is selected, rather than A and B are selected? They write: 

   The "gene selectionism" Dawkins popularized depends on the
   concept of "genes for" traits: if individual genes are to be
   the targets of selection, they must be "visible": they have
   to be real entities with similar phenotypic effects in a
   particular context.

Sterelny and Griffiths observe that the phrase "gene for" can indicate a molecular sequence that makes a difference in the phenotype of a particular individual, or it can indicate those sequences that consistently make a particular difference in the phenotype in a given context. In the former case, there is no guarantee that the gene will have the same phenotypic effects in other individuals and in other contexts; while in the latter case, although the "genes" have a constant phenotypic effect, there is no guarantee that the DNA sequences underlying these effects are identical or part of the same lineage. They argue that "gene selectionist" ideas depend on an "empirical bet": unless "genes lineages ... have some form of underlying molecular unity and some form of similar phenotypic effect ... we can make no sense of the idea that the fate of phenotypes affects evolution only through its effect on gene lineages."

Some clear-cut examples of selection at the level of the gene include meiotic drive and retrotransposons. In both of these cases, gene sequences increase their relative frequency in a population without necessarily providing benefits at other levels of organization. Meiotic-drive mutations (see segregation distortion) manipulate the machinery of chromosomal segregation so that chromosomes carrying the mutation are later found in more than half of the gametes produced by individuals heterozygous for the mutation, and for this reason the frequency of the mutation increases in the population. Retrotransposons are DNA sequences that generate copies of themselves that later insert themselves in the genome more or less randomly. Such insertions can be very mutagenic and thus reduce drastically individual fitness, so that there is strong selection against elements that are very active. Meiotic-drive alleles have also been shown strongly to reduce individual fitness, clearly exemplifying the potential conflict between selection at different levels.

Selection at the level of the cell

Leo Buss in his book The Evolution of Individuality proposes that much of the evolution of development in metazoans reflects the conflict between selective pressures acting at the level of the cell and those acting at the level of the multicellular individual. This perspective allows one to make sense straightforwardly of phenomena as diverse as cancer, gastrulation, and germ line sequestration. Cancer, e.g., occurs when individual cells in the body mutate and develop the ability of proliferating without the restrains acting on normal cells which this way are forced to serve the needs of the individual organism. However, one must be careful not to abuse such verbalizations to avoid trivializing them. The proliferation of specific cells of the vertebrate immune system to fight off infecting pathogens, e.g., could be described as a case of cellular selection, but it is better described as a case of programmed and exquisitely contained cellular proliferation.

Selection at the level of individual organism

Selection at the level of the organism can be described as Darwinism, and is well understood and considered common. If a relatively faster gazelle manages to survive and reproduce more, the causation of the higher fitness of this gazelle can be fully accounted for if one looks at how individual gazelles fare under predation. The speed of the faster gazelle could be caused by a single gene, be polygenic, or be fully environmentally determined, but the unit of selection in this case is the individual since speed is a property of each individual gazelle. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins refers to this as a survival machine.

Selection at the level of the group

Main article: Group selection

If a group of organisms, owing to their interactions or division of labor, provides superior fitness compared to other groups, where the fitness of the group is higher or lower than the mean fitness of the constituent individuals, group selection can be declared to occur.[citation needed].

Specific syndromes of selective factors can create situations in which groups are selected because they display group properties which are selected-for. Some mosquito-transmitted rabbit viruses, for instance, are only transmitted to uninfected rabbits from infected rabbits which are still alive. This creates a selective pressure on every group of viruses already infecting a rabbit not to become too virulent and kill their host rabbit before enough mosquitoes have bitten it, since otherwise all the viruses inside the dead rabbit would rot with it. And indeed in natural systems such viruses display much lower virulence levels than do mutants of the same viruses that in laboratory culture readily outcompete non-virulent variants (or than do tick-transmitted viruses since ticks do bite dead rabbits)[citation needed].

Species selection and selection at higher taxonomic levels

It remains controversial among biologists whether selection can operate at and above the level of species. One particular defender of the idea of species selection was S.J. Gould who proposed the view that there exist macroevolutionary processes which shape evolution at and above the level of species and are not driven by the microevolutionary mechanisms that are the basis of the Modern Synthesis. If one views species as individuals that replicate (speciate) and die (go extinct), then species could be subject to selection and thus could change their occurrence over geological time, much as heritable selected-for traits change theirs over the generations.

For evolution to be driven by species selection, differential success must be the result of selection upon species-intrinsic properties, rather than for properties of genes, cells, individuals, or populations within species. Such properties include, for example, population structure, their propensity to speciate, extinction rates, and geological persistence. While the fossil record shows differential persistence of species, examples of species-intrinsic properties subject to natural selection have been much harder to document.

References

  • Wilson, D.S. (2006). Human groups as adaptive units: toward a permanent consensus. In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence & S. Stich (Eds.), The Innate Mind: Culture and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Full text
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unit_of_selection&oldid=155350870"