“It remains controversial among biologists whether selection can operate at and above the level of species.”
That seems to be a rather confused way of putting it. Or course selection operates between species. The issue is whether it results in very much in the way of species-level adaptations.
I did a quick search on Google and found a paper from 2010 which claims that “Species selection as a potential driver of macroevolutionary trends has been relegated to a largely philosophical position in modern evolutionary biology.”
Did you read the whole abstract? They say “species selection is an important process”:
Species selection as a potential driver of macroevolutionary trends has been relegated to a largely philosophical position in modern evolutionary biology. Fundamentally, species selection is the outcome of heritable differences in speciation and extinction rates among lineages when the causal basis of those rate differences can be decoupled from genotypic (within-population) fitnesses. Here, we discuss the rapidly growing literature on variation in species diversification rates as inferred from molecular phylogenies. We argue that modern studies of diversification rates demonstrate that species selection is an important process influencing both the evolution of biological diversity and distributions of phenotypic traits within higher taxa. Explicit recognition of multi-level selection refocuses our attention on the mechanisms by which traits influence speciation and extinction rates.
I did read the whole abstract: the author admits that species selection is controversial in modern evolutionary biology, and in the rest of the paper argues that this should not be the case. The point of my previous comment was not whether species selection should or should not be recognized as important, because I do not know. It was a question concerning how well-accepted species selection is amongst biologists.
That seems to be a rather confused way of putting it. Or course selection operates between species. The issue is whether it results in very much in the way of species-level adaptations.
Did you read the whole abstract? They say “species selection is an important process”:
I did read the whole abstract: the author admits that species selection is controversial in modern evolutionary biology, and in the rest of the paper argues that this should not be the case. The point of my previous comment was not whether species selection should or should not be recognized as important, because I do not know. It was a question concerning how well-accepted species selection is amongst biologists.