Selection at the level of the community: the importance of spatial structure

Abstract

To ask whether natural selection occurs at the level of the community is to consider whether communities represent a major transition in evolution - can particular community configurations evolve and maintain their integrity in the face of disruption arising from the self-interest of component individuals? This requires heritable variation among subcommunities in a landscape, and that alternative subcommunities maintain a degree of individuality in both time and space. Recently developed models show that spatial self-structuring in multispecies systems can meet both criteria and provide a rich substrate for community-level selection and a major transition in evolution.