Social selection
Social selection is a term used with varying meanings in biology.
Joan Roughgarden proposed a hypothesis called social selection as an alternative to sexual selection. Social selection is argued to be a mode of natural selection based on reproductive transactions and a two-tiered approach to evolution and the development of social behavior. Reproductive transactions refer to a situation where one organism offers assistance to another in exchange for access to reproductive opportunity. The two tiers of the theory are behavioral and population genetic. The genetic aspect states that anisogamy arose to maximize contact rate between gametes. The behavioral aspect is concerned with cooperative game theory and the formation of social groups to maximize the production of offspring. In her critique against the neo-Darwinian defense of sexual selection, Roughgarden outlines exceptions to many of the assumptions that come with sexual selection. These exceptions include sexually monomorphic species, species which reverse standard sex roles, species with template multiplicity, species with transgender presentation, frequencies of homosexual mating, and the lack of correlation between sexually selected traits and deleterious mutation.
An article published by Roughgarden's lab on her ideas received criticism in the journal Science. Forty scientists produced ten critical letters. The critics stated that the article was misleading, that it contained misunderstandings and misrepresentations, that sexual selection accounted for all the data presented and subsumed Roughgarden's theoretical analysis, and that sexual selection explained data that her theory could not.
Other researchers, such as biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard and evolutionary medicine researcher Randolph M. Nesse, instead view sexual selection as a subcategory of social selection, with Nesse and anthropologist Christopher Boehm arguing further that altruism in humans held fitness advantages that enabled evolutionarily extraordinary cooperativeness and the human capability of creating culture, as well as capital punishment by band societies against bullies, thieves, free-riders, and psychopaths.