In Global Brain, Howard Bloom presents a vision of humanity as a global brain, acting in coordination to accomplish goals. He compares us to a colony of bacteria, which he believes can coordinate well to find food and avoid danger by rapidly passing messages between each bacterial cell. His justification of the belief that the global brain is possible relies quite a bit on the notion of group selection. Group selection is in many ways the opposite of individual selection, which proposes that each individual organism acts in its own best interest at all times, in the hope of maximizing the spread and success of its genetic successors. Taken a step further, Richard Dawkins argues in his book The Selfish Gene that the gene is the unit of selection, and that each gene is competing for dominance.

     Group selectionists take a different view, stating that selection often occurs on the level of groups. Groups compete amongst themselves and the best group then survives and reproduces. Bloom discusses apoptosis, or cell death, which occurs when a cell willingly kills itself based on a message from the group that it is no longer useful. Bloom believes that the same sort of process occurs in humans and other macro-organisms. He believes that biological triggers cause depression and sickness in humans when they think they are not contributing to society. Thus, humans will eliminate themselves if they are not contributing properly to the group. This cannot be explained by individual selection, according to Bloom.

     Group selection is a notion that makes a lot of sense to me. It seems to be based philosophically on two notions which we have discussed in relation to networks in this course. Firstly, it seems to suggest that there are truly emergent properties of systems which are not properties of the elements that make them up. We can take an example from the birds and the bees. No human can reproduce in isolation, and thus the creation of babies is an emergent property of networks of humans. Humans who are not members of a group will not be able to reproduce, so they will be selected against. Now, we consider bees. A swarm of bees is a very dangerous thing for a human because hundreds of bee stings can cause death, but a single sting is only a moderate annoyance. Bees are only dangerous in groups. Also, bees and flowers have an interesting relationship which is cooperative among species. Flowers provide food for bees and bees give flowers the ability to reproduce. Without each other, neither could survive, yet neither the bees nor the flowers are cognizant of the needs of the other.

     The other notion inherent in group selection is the concept of layers. Group selection does not make any claims about which particular groups are selected for. It suggests that groups of groups may be selected for. Here, we see the idea that groups are often groups of smaller groups, which are themselves made up of even smaller groups. Viewed this way, individual selection is an instance of group selection. Particularly, individual selection of multi-cellular organisms is merely the selection of the most successful group of specialized cells coordinating to form a larger organism .

     Group selection also plays well with Fritjof Capra's Web Of Life, wherein he suggests that all organisms in the world are linked in important and complex ways. He claims that we should view the world as a system of which we are all a part. If we do not respect other organisms, the effects of our actions will eventually feed back on us and result in the demise of the human race. This sounds a lot like group selection. If we do not contribute to the group, we will eventually be selected against by the ultimate law of nature, evolution.

     Group selection seems to me to be an approach to evolution which takes into account the natural network structure of many of the groups in nature. It is an approach to evolution which accepts the complexity and interconnectedness of much of nature. Evolution already takes into account the myriad interactions of a network of organisms and how they influence each other and allow each other to survive. Group selection also accounts for the fact that these networks can be separated into sub-networks which can also compete with each other and cooperate to support the greater network. This higher complexity model seems like, if it were accepted, it would provide a much better approach to understanding the huge complexity of evolution.