The Evolution Of A Renegade - David Sloan Wilson
The Joe Walker Podcast
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The Origins of Individualism
The idea of society as something which is an entity in its own right was a very, very common idea. That led to a tradition called functionalism that explained cultures and societies on the basis of how well they worked for the group. Williams called it the theory of individual selection. Dawkins notched it still further down to a theory of gene level selection. So in some ways it seems that what took place in evolution was marching in lockstep with broader cultural trends. We cannot explain what happened in the field of evolution in isolation from what was happening elsewhere.
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