From seedmagazine.com:
In his latest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that social darwinists like Skilling have learned the wrong lessons about the natural world. The nasty, brutish existence dominated by “savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit” that Dawkins describes is far from the norm for animals that live in social groups. They thrive because of the cooperation, conciliation, and, above all, the empathy that they display towards fellow members. The support and protection they receive from living in a group more than compensates for any selfish advantage they might have achieved on their own...
Dawkins’ perspective has been challenged, not just by the usual Christian agitators, but by biologists who don’t agree that it is an accurate picture of the natural world. SUNY–Binghampton evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson (no relation) have argued that altruism and cooperation can better be explained through multilevel selection (the idea that groups and not just individuals are important for success in the genetic game). Darwin first discussed this idea of group selection in his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Another approach has been that by Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden whose recent book The Genial Gene proposes “social selection” as an alternative to the ruthless competitive drive for individual reproductive success.
The problem with individual selection, these critics point out, is not that it’s wrong but that it’s not the full story. Dawkins’ selfish gene is ultimately a metaphor about how genes transmit themselves to the next generation, but individual animals are not completely independent agents. Members of a group are embedded within a fabric of social relations—their actions can help or hurt the survival of all individuals collectively.
So, for example, when a lioness patrols and defends the territory of her pride, while free riders in her group are content to lounge in the sun, all members of the group ultimately benefit. A pride that consisted of only selfish individuals might allow a few cunning cats to succeed temporarily, but the group as a whole wouldn’t stand a chance. Greed may be good where it comes to personal advancement, as Gordon Gekko’s character in Wall Street insists, but when no one is minding the store the whole system can collapse. Or, as Wilson and Wilson famously wrote in The Quarterly Review of Biology: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
More here.
