To me, the key point of "The Selfish Gene" was that the base unit of evolution is the gene. I don't see anything in this article which disagrees with this notion, and they did quote a biologist who said something similar:
Pruitt and Goodnight don’t propose a mechanism by which the colonies boomeranged back to their original state. And without such a mechanism, some researchers argue that the results could be due to ordinary selection acting on individuals. “I think they over-interpret [the results] as evidence of group-level selection,” said Andy Gardner, a biologist at the University of Oxford. “Natural selection may factor in the needs of the group, to some extent, when it hones the adaptations of individuals. But group fitness is not the whole story.”
I understand Gardner's point to be that even if the selection pressure starts at the group level, it can still go down to the individual, and then down to the gene. In that sense, we're still selecting the gene.
Actually, upon reading the actual article, the authors say basically the same thing in the first paragraph:
"In societies in which individual fitness is tightly linked with the performance of the group, the theory of group selection predicts that evolution will favour traits in individuals that aid in maximizing their group’s success—which, in turn, are predicted to increase individuals’ long-term evolutionary interests. Here we define group selection as selection caused by the differential extinction or proliferation of groups1. This represents a broad definition that is not in any way adversarial to the importance of kinship selection for social evolution."
Assuming I understand the authors correctly, they mean that the "fitness" of an individual cannot always be considered to be in isolation. In order to determine the fitness of an individual, we may have to consider the combination of the individual, and the group in which they live. I see that as consistent with the notion of a "selfish gene", as I understand it.
Pruitt and Goodnight don’t propose a mechanism by which the colonies boomeranged back to their original state. And without such a mechanism, some researchers argue that the results could be due to ordinary selection acting on individuals. “I think they over-interpret [the results] as evidence of group-level selection,” said Andy Gardner, a biologist at the University of Oxford. “Natural selection may factor in the needs of the group, to some extent, when it hones the adaptations of individuals. But group fitness is not the whole story.”
I understand Gardner's point to be that even if the selection pressure starts at the group level, it can still go down to the individual, and then down to the gene. In that sense, we're still selecting the gene.
Actually, upon reading the actual article, the authors say basically the same thing in the first paragraph:
"In societies in which individual fitness is tightly linked with the performance of the group, the theory of group selection predicts that evolution will favour traits in individuals that aid in maximizing their group’s success—which, in turn, are predicted to increase individuals’ long-term evolutionary interests. Here we define group selection as selection caused by the differential extinction or proliferation of groups1. This represents a broad definition that is not in any way adversarial to the importance of kinship selection for social evolution."
Assuming I understand the authors correctly, they mean that the "fitness" of an individual cannot always be considered to be in isolation. In order to determine the fitness of an individual, we may have to consider the combination of the individual, and the group in which they live. I see that as consistent with the notion of a "selfish gene", as I understand it.