prevailing environmental conditions over a long period of time. We would be hard pressed to determine through a cursory analysis the natural selection benefit or liability of such characteristics.

Natural selection, as initially proposed by Darwin, is a process that involves interactions among individuals. Almost since its inception, there has been heated discussion about whether natural selection extends to mechanisms and processes involving not just individuals, but groups of individuals. For many species, termed social species, their individual members tend to live and operate within groups. The point of controversy relates to whether the groupings within social species contribute to the evolutionary success or failure of these species. The debate centers specifically on whether any evolutionary benefit accrues to the groups themselves or just to the individual members of the group; or, do groups have any evolutionary significance at all? Do groups evolve relative to each other, hence implying there is some evolutionary feedback loop within the individual members that pertains to group organization and operational dynamics; or, does a group simply provide an enhanced environment in which individuals within the group benefit in the natural selection process versus other individuals?

Certainly, from their membership in a group the individual members of a species may well receive a benefit relative to individual selection since propagation of the species is a product of individual propagation. However, it also appears relatively assured that groups are beneficial in that they extend the natural selection process from a simple gauge of individuals (a single level selection process) to a more complex gauge of individuals, first as members of a group and then as individuals, thus resulting in a multi-level natural selection process. We can therefore encompass the concept of multi-level selection within our working definition of natural selection by defining the concept of multi-level selection as:

In a group under threat, transmissible traits of the individuals within the group that minimize that threat grow at the expense of traits that don’t.

For the moment, this definition certainly begs the question of what the transmission mechanism might be. For the individual organism, DNA provides such a mechanism. We will defer until a later chapter a consideration of a potential mechanism for groups. Indeed, what we do see at this point is that evolution applies to all venues of life, and within the human species, various grouping mechanisms are certainly consistently recurrent venues. A recurring theme within these venues is that of sacrifice. Sacrifice is a concept that is counter-intuitive when considering the process of natural selection. Sacrifice, by its very definition, suggests that an individual performs some act, either consciously and subconsciously, that may well be detrimental to that individual and yet beneficial to another. Should the act result in the death of the individual, then there is no opportunity for that trait, the trait of sacrifice itself, to be further propagated to a new generation. Hence, it would seem that natural selection, over time, would remove the concept of sacrifice from the vernacular; but this would not appear to be the case, with many species.

In Africa, wildebeest are documented to cross a river full of crocodiles, letting some die while the majority makes it safely to the other side. The threat stems from the initial situation that there is not enough food for the herd. One might speculate that there would be enough food for any one wildebeest, if all the others were gone. So, no wildebeest would seem to have an incentive to cross the river. In fact, it would seem that the paramount incentive would be to let the other wildebeest cross. Apparently, however, wildebeest do not like to live alone. Hence, the recurring scenario that plays out with every cycle of the wet season turning to dry finds the herd moving to new grazing grounds. When the herd encounters the river, the individual members plunge into the

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