I have been a student of evolutionary psychology for most of its history. I first read Steven Pinker's Language Instinct in 1995. I studied Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997) and other EP texts. I bought both David Buss's textbook Evolutionary Psychology (first edition, 1999) and Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson's Unto Others (1998) when they first came out.
After studying Unto Others, I have fully embraced its argument that evolutionary theorists had been unnecessarily dismissive of group selection. Sober and Wilson show that theories that have been put forward as alternatives to group selection--such as inclusive fitness theory, evolutionary game theory, and the selfish gene theory--do not at all disprove group selection. The alternative theories simply use different methods to compute what amounts to special cases of group selection within a context of multilevel selection. Group selection is there, but researchers use techniques such as the averaging fallacy which hide it from view. The main conceptual models for evolutionary theory can be reframed into examples of group selection without changing any of the facts but simply reinterpreting them. Leaders of evolutionary theory therefore dismiss group selection even as they actually employ it.
When I accepted this argument, I fully expected evolutionary theorists to embrace multilevel selection theory. That did not happen. I also expected theorists of evolutionary psychology to embrace it. Buss's 1999 textbook had even mentioned Sober and Wilson's 1998 book in passing. However, I recently decided to review the current state of theory for evolutionary psychology by studying the sixth edition (2019) of Buss's textbook. Much to my surprise, Buss continues to maintain a skeptical distance from group selection by name (page 379). Buss seems to take his cue from Steven Pinker, who has used his megaphone to reject group selection loudly. (I even looked through the fourth edition of another evolutionary psychology textbook by Workman and Reader (2021), and it is also on the surface cool toward group selection.)
Even in his first edition, Buss had employed inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism, so his textbook has always used aspects of group selection without admitting it or possibly understanding that he was using it. By the sixth edition of the textbook, Buss has added a discussion of "cooperative coalitions" (pages 267-271) without admitting that they are fundamentally examples of group selection. He discusses two theories for explaining them without realizing that those theories do not work unless there is a fitness advantage in the biological genes for group cooperation. One of the theories is even called "cultural group selection" (Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, 1985).
Likewise in later editions, Buss's discussion of social hierarchies goes beyond simple violence-based dominance hierarchies and introduces more sophisticated models called prestige hierarchies. Prestige hierarchies rely heavily on the pro-social behavioral mechanisms that promote group-level fitness, but Buss still does not seem to understand that he is employing group selection.
In Part 20 of my Theory of Humor series, I wrote about a distinction I personally make between different types of social hierarchies. I called the first a "hard dominance" hierarchy. I called the second a "softer social status" hierarchy. Buss's prestige hierarchy is similar to (but not entirely congruent with) my "softer social status" hierarchy. Like my "softer status" concept, the prestige is freely given by others in the group. Here is a quote from Buss, 6/e (page 339):
In modern social groups, individuals acquire prestige by displaying high levels of competence on tasks that groups value, displaying generosity by giving more than taking, and making personal sacrifices that signal commitment to the group (Anderson and Kilduff, 2009). In the path to prestige, it is better to give than to receive.Buss claims that presitge is generated by reciprocal altruism. I consider it mind-boggling that he does not understand that reciprocal altruism is a subset of the range of possible group selection behaviors within multilevel selection theory. The above quote is a perfect example of this point, but Buss continues explicitly to remain agnostic toward "group selection." Buss claims the above is reciprocal altruism, but it is a reciprocity that is not one-to-one but indirect, or many-to-many, among large groups. This sort of many-to-many reciprocity is group selection. I am still waiting for him to fully embrace group selection. I may have to wait a long time.
My point is that my framework for ELC depends on the acceptance of group selection within multilevel selection theory to explain many aspects of literature. If you truly used a version of evolutionary psychology without any group selection, you will be left with an impoverished tool for evolutionary literary criticism. However, it might not be too bad if you take Buss's approach. Buss's approach is to decline to embrace group selection explicitly but then call it indirect reciprocity and use it anyway. It is not logically rigorous, but that is what the evolutionary psychologists seem to do.
Why do current evolutionary psychologists avoid group selection by name? Perhaps because early group selection theorists hypothesized that organisms could treat "their entire species as a whole" as a group or "the local multi-species ecosystem as a whole" as a group. That sort of universal group selection is not part of Multilevel Selection Theory. Perhaps the label "group selection" is avoided to steer clear of theories that argue that universal altruism can arise by natural selection. But by any other name, much of what evolutionary psychologists theorize about is still group selection.
My advice: Spend time on a close reading of Sober and Wilson's Unto Others. That text shows the evolutionary logic that drives concepts like cooperative coalitions and prestige hierarchies. Group selection may still be "he who must not be named," but it is critical to ELC because it is critical to the human social order.
