Similarly, Slobodkin and Rapaport assumed that a unit of selection is something that "responds to selective forces as a unit whether or not this corresponds to a spatially localized deme, family, or population" (1974, p. 184).
And natural selection selects something that the genes and other parts of the unit of selection do not contain.
In the first stage, the unit of selection was the census tract and from 456 census tracts, 30 were randomly selected (plus 2 in case substitutions were needed).
Dawkins, R. The Extended Phenotype: the Gene as the Unit of Selection.
Once the gene is considered as the unit of selection, it is clear how genes for altruism can spread.
He's come up with an extraordinary theory that the nest itself is the unit of selection, not the individual insects.
Darwinian natural selection identified a mechanism and – once genes had been discovered, unknown to Darwin, by a Moravian monk called Gregor Mendel – a unit of selection.
A more vigorous and explicit metaphysics would be needed to make the idea of species as unit of selection spring to life.
Following Richard Dawkins, he sees the unit of selection, that which persists across generations, as the gene, a prime mover embedded like a computer program driving the "lumbering robot" that is the living organism.
It was Dawkins's simple, but profound, proposition that "the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual.
The developmental system as a whole is the unit of selection.
