Two SFI researchers write in a letter published in Nature that the longstanding debate in social evolution about whether individual-level selection or kin selection accounts for the evolution of altruism parallels the statistical physics-thermodynamics debate that took place among physicists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The letter by SFI Faculty Chair David Krakauer and SFI Professor Jessica Flack was prompted by an August 26 paper in Nature by Harvard's Martin Nowak and colleagues, which challenged the generality of inclusive-fitness theory and put its proponents on the defensive.
Krakauer and Flack suggest that the complexity of biological systems and their strong interdependencies call for a theoretical foundation in which aggregate variables are derived from models of microscopic processes. Just as statistical mechanics provides the foundations for thermodynamics, models of microscopic processes in biological systems can provide the foundation and justification for the choice of macroscopic variables at higher scales.
Read the abridged letter as published in Nature.
Read the full letter as submitted for publication.
Read the August 26 Nowak et al executive summary from Nature.