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This chapter develops an abstract framework for thinking about selection acting at multiple hierarchical levels. The nature of hierarchical organization is analyzed, in particular the idea that interaction among lower-level entities is what gives rise to a higher-level entity. The relation between characters, fitnesses, and heritabilities at two hierarchical levels is discussed as a precursor to understanding multi-level selection. An important ambiguity in the notion of multi-level selection, due to J. Damuth and I. L. Heisler, is then examined. Both types of multi-level selection (MLS1 and MLS2) are analyzed using Price's equation and contrasted with each other.

This chapter examines the sociobiology of human cooperation. Given the tendency of people to copy the successful and the fact that natural selection favors the more fit, the chapter asks how our altruistic preferences overcame the cultural and biological evolutionary handicaps entailed by the reduced payoffs that they elicited. To answer this question, two major biological explanations of cooperation are discussed: inclusive fitness in either a kin-based or a multi-level selection model, and reciprocal altruism and its indirect reciprocity and costly signaling variants. The chapter explores a model of inclusive fitness based on group differentiation and competition, clarifying what is meant by multi-level selection and how it works. It also discusses models that address equilibrium selection, the link between standing strategy and indirect reciprocity, and positive assortment. Finally, it assesses the mechanisms and motives underlying helping behavior.

In a feedback-driven model of language change, conflict between patterns at distinct levels of linguistic organization can be understood as a form of multi-level selection. Simulations of conflicts between phonological and morphological patterns show that positive feedback can promote pattern consolidation at one level at the expense of the other. In this way, analogical generalizations over subparts of the lexicon can be shown to be emergent properties of complex linguistic systems.

Biological organisms and human organizations are both multi-level cooperative systems subject to the process of natural selection. We explain how Darwin's profound insight – descent with modification – can be and is being extended beyond the purely biological through contemporary theoretical advances in the areas of social cognition and learning to explain behavior in groups, organizations and societies. We argue that genes and culture have interacted over the millennia of human history to forge within our species a cooperative instinct along with the mechanisms needed to sustain cooperation in large social groups such as organizations. The implications of this argument are developed and discussed as they relate to three organizational phenomena; decision making, management control, and leadership. In conclusion we encourage management scholars to further explore how this perspective can be used to develop new insights and understanding to advance the field of organizational behavior and management theory.

This chapter argues that language, which rests on the sharing of linguistic norms, honest information, and moral norms, evolved through a co-evolutionary process with a pivotal role for intersubjectivity. Mainstream evolutionary models, based only on individual-level and gene-level selection, are suggested to be incapable to account for such sharing of care, values and information, thus implying the need to evoke multi-level selection, including (cultural) group selection. Four of the most influential current theories of the evolution of human-scale sociality, those of Dunbar, Deacon, Tomasello, and Hrdy, are compared and evaluated on the basis of their answers to five questions: (1) Why we and not others? (2) How: by what mechanisms? (3) When? (4) In what kind of social settings? (5) What are the implications for ontogeny? The conclusions are that the theories are to a large degree complementary, and that they all assume, explicitly or not, a role for group selection.

In group-structured populations in which some other assumptions are satisfied, kin and group selectionist methods provide formally equivalent conditions for change. However, this only shows an equivalence between two statistical methodologies, and this is compatible with there being a real, causal distinction between kin and group selection processes. This chapter pursues a Hamilton-inspired, population-centred approach to drawing that distinction, on which the differences between kin and group selection are differences of degree in the structural properties of populations. The relevant properties are K, the overall degree to which genealogical kin interact differentially, and G, the overall degree to which the population contains stable, internally integrated, and externally isolated social groups. A spatial metaphor (‘K-G space’) provides a useful framework for thinking about these differences.