An interesting point that was unnoticed – for me – until now is the level on which natural selection works. Darwin chooses to follow as the crucial level of natural selection the organism, the lowest available to him level, and tries to defend this choice against the possibility of selection working at higher organizational levels (group selection).

A bit of research on the internet on this very intersting matter has managed to confuse me even more as till now I was quite happy to accept the Dawkins popularized idea of gene selection, (which Stephen jay Gould dismisses due to ‘contradictions’ in page 136) and on the other hand I always found the sociobiology and group selection idea quite natural in some situations.

Gould mentions briefly (and probably will expand later on) that he is a proponent of a multilevel hierarchical natural selection. Although i am not really that clear on how thsi theory works my initial thinking is that this is probably close to ‘common sense’ as it can possibly be. If I have to guess in this I would say that the level of evolution depends on the communication capacity of the individual members. Species that are able to communicate (in one way or another) and create social communities are bound to have some level of natural selection working on the community itself.