This volume opens with three chapters that explore the underlying explanatory
framework of sociobiology, the evolutionary path by which Darwinian natural
selection might have brought into being social entities consisting of both conflict-
ing and integrated elements. Michael J. C. Waller contrasts Richard Dawkins's idea
of selfish genes as the basic units of selection with Elliott Sober's account of group
selection. Waller, however, raises doubts about whether selfish genes really trans-
late directly into organismic selection, as Dawkins proposes, or into the converse
view of group selection proposed by Sober. Instead, Waller holds that selfish genes
are the sole basis of a Darwinian solution to cooperative entities. David Smillie
finds that Darwin himself took two different views toward natural selection, the
Malthusian perspective that focused on competitive organisms and, in contrast, a
concern with the generation of variation leading in a quite different direction. The
latter point of view has some real advantages over the former. Peter A. Corning
sees the need to encompass both competition and cooperation between various
entities at different hierarchical levels, and he shows how such interactions can
result in larger synergistic unities. This is a perspective that he finds applicable to
human societies as well as to the rest of the biological world. In all three chapters
there is a search for viewpoints on selection that will reveal how social cooperation
can arise along with competition between parts.

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