Multi-Level
Selection

Multi-Level Selection is a way of understanding evolution that doesn’t stop at the individual. The familiar story says natural selection works on single organisms, each competing to survive and reproduce. MLS says that’s only part of the picture: selection also acts on groups.

A group of cooperators can out-compete a group of cheaters — even when, inside each group, the cheaters are doing better than the cooperators next to them. That tension between what’s good for the individual and what’s good for the group turns out to run through almost everything: how cells became bodies, how bodies became societies, and how a neighborhood, a company, or a city either holds together or comes apart.

On this show we use MLS as a lens. Once you can see the levels — individual and group, pulling in different directions at the same time — a lot of modern life starts to make a different kind of sense.