    7

    dist

    urbing, each of the formulations seemed based in large part on the

    premise that the individual is the basic unit of evolutionary change.

    Competition between groups had been shuffled off the stage.

    Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards, a

    careful observer of his country's native red grouse, concluded that

    these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep

    their flock from starvation.  The grouse, Edwards contended, sensed

    the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted

    their behavior accordingly, delaying breeding when supplies looked

    meager or even opting for total chastity.12  The interests of the group,

    concluded Edwards, overrode those of the individual.

    The backlash to the University of Aberdeen professor's heresy

    was immediate and intense.  Scientists like G.C. Williams and David

    Lack declared  that group selection was "all but impossible."13    And

    august theorists like W.D. Hamilton and R.L. Trivers explained away

    the "altruistic" tendencies Wynne-Edwards had discerned by

    generating a new mathematical system, the theory of kin selection,

    which said that individuals would only sacrifice their own interests in

    favor of others if the others in question were relatives, creatures who

    contained similar sets of genes.14  In other words, self-sacrifice

    represented an individualistic gene selfishly protecting a copy of itself.

    The newly-consolidated theories of individual and kin selection

    were hailed as major achievements and became biological dogma.

    Wynne-Edwards' carefully-reasoned theory, based on decades of fact

    gathering in the field, was tossed aside as a disreputable aberration.  So

    the Scotsman spent fourteen years in the heather gathering fresh

    information, tabulated the resulting statistics, then printed the

    conclusions in his 1986 work Evolution Through Group Selection.  The

    book was virtually ignored.15

    However, in the late '80s, an uneasy sense that evolution may not

    be limited to the level of the individual organism or gene showed signs

    of inching toward sciences' peripheral vision.  Stephen Jay Gould

    puzzled over the fact that there's too much genetic variation--more

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