Dear Elliott and David,

I shall start with an overview of how I see things quite generally, and what my strategy has been in approaching the units of selection debates. Then I shall address individual points regarding your book.

For the past ten years, I have been focusing my attention in the units of selection debates on a diagnostic question. The situation, as I was convinced by the time of the publication of my 1988 book (The Structure and Confirmation of Evolutionary Theory) by both your work, and the work of Michael Wade, Robert Colwell, Marcus Feldman, Montgomery Slatkin, and others, is that good models and good evidence exist to demonstrate the presence and efficacy of levels of selection above the individual organism or mating pair. It also seemed clear to me that some of these higher-level cases were not best understood as families (i.e., as subject to kin selection): in Wade's case because the cases weren't, and in Wilson and Colwell's case because I was persuaded by their arguments and evidence that kin selection is a special case of group selection.

Yet many evolutionists remained unconvinced by any of the evidence and models that I found compelling. This led me to a question: Why did John Maynard Smith, George C. Williams, Len Nunney, Robert Trivers, Richard Dawkins, and so on, continue to argue against the group selection models and the evidence?