Abstract

The future of selection: individuality, the twin legacies of Lamarck & Darwin

The different levels of biological hierarchy - genes, chromosomes, cells, species and communities - are different survival entities that require different heritable variations in fitness in order to function as units of selection in the evolutionary process. These entities have retained to varying degrees some of their primordial lower-level identity, where selfish survival of genes was instrumental to better and multiply their type. That lower-level unit was natural selection’s milieu.

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