Gould wrote p 677 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
"I like to play a game of "science fiction" by imagining myself as an individual of another scale (not just as a human being shrunken or enlarged for a vist to such a terra incognita). But I do not know how far I can succeed. As organisms, we have eyes to see the world of selection and adaptation as expressed in the good desgin of wings, legs, and brains. But randomness may predominate in the world of genes - and we might interpret the universe very differently if our primary vantage point resided in this lower level. We mightthen note a world of largely independent items, drifting in and out by the luck of the draw - but with little islands dotted about here and there, where selection slows down the ordinary tempo and embryology ties things together. How, then, shall we comprehend the still different order of a world much larger than ourselves? If we missed the strange world of genic neutrality because we are too big, then what passes above our gaze becuase we are too small? Perhaps we become stymied, like genes trying to grasp the much larger world of change in bodies, when we, as bodies, try to contemplate the domain of evolution among species in the vastness of geological time? What are we missing in trying to read this world by the inappropriate scale of our small bodies and minuscule lifetimes?
Once we have become mentally prepared to seek and appreciate (and not to ignore or devalue) the structural and causal differences among nature's richly various scales, we can formulate more fruitfully the two cardinal properties that make the theory of hierarchical selection both so interesting and so differnet from the convential single-level Darwinism of organismal selection. The key to both properties lies in "interdependence with difference" - for the hierarchical levels of causality, while bonded in interaction, are also (for some attributes) fairly independent in modality. Moreover, these levels invariably diverge, one from the other, despite unifying principles, like selection, applicable to all levels. Allometry, not pure fractality, rules aong the scales of nature."
I dont think our beloved EvC has gotten here yet despite the obvious weight on the E side of mike's V"". I thought of this when the bacetrial avatar looked like a man once. Saymasu's reproductive position aside in the last sentence of Gould to which I have not been able to philosphically judge as to if S already wrote on this herein you asked this science fiction question to Mike I think for the reason I mentioned already in this thread that Matchtte explains that individuals are still linked relative to the absolute- this would apply to Gould's notion of core extended individuality from the multilevel perspective but we would need a tool or a way to assume the time event sequence you mentioned or the scale differences in size changes different levels of organization provide. I feel that only a specialized .net application using XML targeted to say this audience which automatically coordinates the levels in the discussion esle we end with Joralex being accused falsely I would see for not being at every point in the table of entries that the maximum flow of posters is at. I am likely guilty of this as well.