Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

Natural selectioncould theoretically occur even at higher levels than the population or species.Consequently, it is possible that entire flora and fauna communities could compete together or, on a cosmic scale, entire biospheres of various planets.Ecological data indicate that competition between communities does actually occur and sequences of succession stages have been described, which regularly alternate in a certain biotope.However, from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, competition at a higher level than intraspecies is a rare phenomenon.The main factor responsible for minimal effectiveness of selection at a community level consists in low heritability of the properties of communities.If selection actually occurs at the level of ecological communities, then everything that was said of group selection is also true here (to an elevated degree).