 But consider the lineage-wide trait of variability. Treating species as interactors has a long tradition (Dobzhansky 1956, Thoday 1953, Lewontin 1958). If species are conceived as interactors (and not necessarily manifestors of adaptations), then the notion of species selection is not vulnerable to the original anti group-selection objections from the early genic selectionists (Williams  1966).[12]  The old idea was that lineages with certain properties of being able to respond to environmental stresses would be selected for, and thus that the trait of variability itself would be selected for and would spread in the population of populations. In other words, lineages were treated as interactors. The earlier researchers spoke loosely of adaptations where adaptations were treated in the weak sense as equivalent simply to the outcome of selection processes (at any level). They were explicitly not concerned with the effect of species selection on organismic level traits but with the effect on species-level characters such as speciation rates, lineage-level survival, and extinction rates of species. Some argued, including the present author, that this sort of case represents a perfectly good form of species selection, using so-called “emergent fitnesses,” even though some balk at the thought that variability would then be considered, under a weak definition, a species-level adaptation (Lloyd &amp; Gould 1993; Lloyd 1988 [1994]). Paleontologists used this approach to species selection in their research on fossil gastropods (Jablonski 2008, 1987; Jablonski &amp; Hunt 2006), and the approach has also been used in the leading text on speciation (Coyne &amp; Orr 2004).