One of the core concepts in social evolution theory is kin selection. Kin selection provides a perspective to understand how natural selection operates when genetically similar individuals are likely to interact. A family-structured population is an excellent example of this, where relatives are engaged in social interactions. Consequences of such social interactions are often described in game...

Coalescent theory provides an elegant and powerful method for understanding the shape of gene genealogies and resulting patterns of genetic diversity. However, the coalescent does not naturally accommodate the effects of heritable variation in fitness. Although some methods are available for studying the effects of strong selection (Ns >> 1), few tools beyond forward simulation are available fo...

The latter half of the twentieth century has been marked by debates in evolutionary biology over the relative significance of natural selection and random drift: the so-called “neutralist/selectionist” debates. Yet John Beatty has argued that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the concept of random drift from the concept of natural selection, a claim that has been accepted by ma...

Natural selection has been criticized as a tautology. This would be a major problem for evolutionary biology, if true, because tautological statements can't be falsified and, therefore, can't be scientific. There is merit to this critique insofar as the theory of natural selection is indeed generally described in a tautological manner. However, natural selection can be described non-tautologica...

Fisher's 'fundamental theorem of natural selection' is notoriously abstract, and, no less notoriously, many take it to be false. In this paper, I explicate the theorem, examine the role that it played in Fisher's general project for biology, and analyze why it was so very fundamental for Fisher. I defend and Lessard (1997) in the view that the theorem is in fact a true theorem if, as Fisher cla...

The maintenance of "public" or "common good" producers is a major question in the evolution of cooperation. Because nonproducers benefit from the shared resource without bearing its cost of production, they may proliferate faster than producers. We established a synthetic microbial system consisting of two Escherichia coli strains of common-good producers and nonproducers. Depending on the popu...

After clarifying how Darwin understood natural selection and common ancestry, I consider how the two concepts are related in his theory. I argue that common ancestry has evidential priority. Arguments about natural selection often make use of the assumption of common ancestry, whereas arguments for common ancestry do not require the assumption that natural selection has been at work. In fact, D...

In this paper, I respond to arguments proposed by Brunnander in this journal issue concerning my position regarding the Creative View of natural selection (Razeto-Barry & Frick, 2011). Brunnander argues that (i) the Creative View we defend does not serve to answer William Paley's question because (ii) Paley's question is "why there are complex things rather than simple ones" and (iii) natural s...

Natural selection is an important factor influencing variation in the human genome, but most genetic studies of natural selection have focused on variants with unknown phenotypic associations. This trend is changing. New studies are rapidly revealing the effects of natural selection on genetic variants of known or likely functional importance.

The notion of antifragility, an attribute of systems that makes them thrive under variable conditions, has recently been proposed by Nassim Taleb in a business context. This idea requires the ability of such systems to 'tinker', i.e., to creatively respond to changes in their environment. A fairly obvious example of this is natural selection-driven evolution. In this ubiquitous process, an orig...