I wish I had read this article or something like it in school. Survival of the fittest then implied survival of the strongest - male animals fighting other males for territory or for females and the strongest winning. Then some decades later I saw the documentary 'Kangaroos - faces in the mob' which was a clear case of evolutionary advantage for something else. Kangaroo females who nurtured their young the best, in association with 'aunts', survived. It wasn't strength that determined who was fittest (well, maybe still for the males), it was the ability to nurture, not alone, but with the help of other females. Some lessons for humanity I'm sure.

Gilbert Holmes,

If you want to investigate the concept of holons, you should probably go to the originator of the term, who was Arthur Koestler - in his book "The Ghost in the Machine".

Koestler describes the way that "everything" is hierarchically ordered. This hierarchy, he proposed as being like the structure of an inverted tree.

Here's a quote:
"A "part" as we generally use the word means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a "whole" is considered as something complete in itself. But "wholes" and "parts" in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere. What we find are intermediary structures or a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity; sub-wholes...In speech, phonemes, words and phrases are wholes in their own right, but parts of a larger unit. So are cells, tissues, organs - families, clans, tribes."

Gilbert, it explains why cooperation and altruism evolved as
worthwhile characteristics, from an evolutionary point of view.

We can study that further in primatology. Chimps who share their
food, are more likely to have other chimps share food at a later
date. We can show that various primates feel empathy for instance.
Or as another poster pointed out, raising the offspring is another
one.

Chimps cooperate to hunt in packs. Its in all their self interest
to do so. But at the end of the day, altruism is once again
grounded in self interest.

I like Professor Louis Bounour's quote

'Evolution is a fairy tale for grown ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless.' He writes this as part of "How evolution became a scientific myth'. Not much has changed as we hear supposedly intelligent people trying to tell us what the future climate will be after making up big stories about the past. Thankfully more and more are starting to doubt the evolution myth despite decades of brainwashing dogmas. The big bang theory is absolutely laughable.

Gilbert Holmes alleges that Darwin made a significant error, but does not identify it or prove it.

He alleges that Darwin is guilty of a kind of conceptual “separatism”. Darwin does not use this term, and never denied that evolution depends on the organism and its environment. He examined things from the point of view of the individual organism at the margins of subsistence, yes. But that is precisely the reason for his eminence. If he had approached his subject as Gilbert or Marx did theirs, he would have got things backassward as they did.

GH may think there is a higher significance to the biological taxa – apart from their descent from a common ancestor – but he doesn’t say what it is. GH may think there is a higher significance to the biological community – apart from its contribution to the survival of species – but doesn’t say what it is.

Having failed to establish his premise, it’s all downhill from there as GH gallops over evolutionary biology, to metaphysics, to economics, to psychology, to systems theory.

GH alleges the “extremes of the separatism described above and the “collectivism”, espoused by theorists such as Marx…”

(Marx actually admired Darwin so much that he asked if he could dedicate “Capital” to him.) But GH has not established any extremes of separatism, nor any meaning, let alone any virtue or necessity, to collectivism.

Marx obviously did not add anything to biological theory. And the reason he failed to add anything but errors and fallacies to economics was precisely because his theory of value considered things in vast collective lumps, like “labour” and “the working class”, rather than in the individual units considered by individual actors.

To allege the “dual drivers behind natural selection:
• the individual/self-interest/survival of the fittest/genetic heritage; and
• the community/benevolence/mutual aid/cultural heritage.”
is mere shameful garbled confusion.

GH’s half-baked homespun theory is neither fish nor fowl, an ugly amalgam of non sequiturs and unverifiable, unfalsifiable syrup, leading to an excuse to get the state to order people to do whatever GH wants and call it balance.

Dear Runner,

Professor Louis Bounour never said that. Prove that I lie. Links to creationist websites don't count.