Species as Individuals in the Hierarchical Theory of Selection 609
into future generations) relative to the progeny of other individuals within the
larger entity of your membership.
INHERITANCE. Your children must, on average, be more like you than like
other parents of your generation—so that evolution may proceed by the differential
increase of your own heritable attributes (a requirement of Darwinian systems, not
of all conceivable evolutionary mechanisms). In other words, a principle of
inheritance must prevail to permit the tracing of genealogical patterns—so that the
relative reproductive success of ancestors may be assessed.
VARIATION. This criterion lies so deeply, and so fundamentally, within the
constitution of Darwinism as a revolutionary ontology (and not just as a theory of
evolution), that we should, perhaps, not even list variation as a separate criterion,
but merely state that this conception underlies all Darwinian thinking. We can
hardly imagine a more radical restructuring of the material