Answers

> Dr. Carter,
> I had an idea today and I wanted to know you opinion on it, if it's "right".
>
> The reason that the Homo sapien specie has been so successful and evolved so
> efficiently is because there is not much evolutionary constraint against
> group selection. Group selection increases the fitness of the group as a
> whole.

Humans are a very unusual species in that we can work out agreements
and cooperatively work together in ways that allow some groups to
succeed over others. By having complex communication we have been able
to have individuals specialize in certain tasks, something that other
organisms rarely have and do allow groups with these individuals to
have higher (or lower) fitness.

I think the bigger trait that humans have that assist group style
selection is that ordinarily individual selection works against group
selection, but if the species has memories and social rules that
prevent selfishness then the sabotage effects of individual selection
can be minimized - humans do this better than any other species

> I also had another question. Can selfishness (opposite of altruism) be
> considered an evolutionary constraint? (individual selection > group
> selection)

Yes, I would consider this a constraint. Relating to your first point
above the relaxation of his constraint may be part of the success of
humans for the reasons I listed above.

> How does plastic surgery effect natural selection? The trait(s) is/are not
> inherited, so what could it to the population over time?

There are two ways to think about this.
(1) The trait is not genetically inherited, but there are some people
that believe that you can study the inheritance and evolution of
social behaviors, the inherited traits are called "memes" and Dawkins
is the highest profile person associated with this idea. This would be
similar to the evolution of other epigenetic traits.
(2) There would be genetic selection for people who survive the
operations better, genes that caused allergies to anesthesia or
increased the chances of complications during surgery would be
selected against - the population would evolve to be better able to
handle medical operations.

What I wrote is just my "off the top of my head" thinking and if you
do a literature search you are likely to find that some
anthropologists has written about these things in detail, although you
have to be careful about the logic of some social science arguments.

> I would highly appreciated if you could give me your thought. I have been
> trying to figure out all semester but just don't know enough to figure it
> out.
>
> Thank you,
> Jocelyn