This hostility was partly based on misunderstanding, which is now largely removed thanks to the efforts of some scholars to clarify what genic selection can mean.
The "genic selection" approach was initially rejected by many as excessively reductionistic.
Thus, they are pluralists, in that they are not ultimately arguing in favor of the genic view; they are, however, expanding the genic selectionist view beyond its previous limits.
They all argue that something significant follows from the fact that hierarchical models or selection processes can be reformulated in terms of the genic level.
And under such an analysis, the claims of Dugatkin and Reeve regarding the equivalency of genic and hierarchical models cannot be sustained.
When the notion of representational adequacy of the models is taken into account, specifically through the inclusion of parametric and dynamical sufficiency as important points of comparison, this equivalence between genic and hierarchical models disappears (Lloyd, Lewontin, and Feldman 2008).
Just as a warning to the unwary, the key to understanding the genic reinterpretation of this case is to grasp that the pluralists use a concept of genetic environment that their critics ignore.
The other major form of critique of genic pluralism is based on arguments concerning the causal structure of selective episodes.
In the genic selection case, the pluralists appear to be claiming that the genic level models are independent from the hierarchical models.
The claim is: although the genic models are mathematically equivalent, they have different parameters, and a different interpretation, and they are completely independent from hierarchical models.
It should be noted that this result does not eliminate the possibility of the genic level acting as interactors in a given case; the results rather refer to the reduction of genotypic and higher level models to the allelic level.
