Never had much use for Richard Dawkins, I have always thought his hypotheses on the selfish gene are fundamentally flawed. Dawkins focuses his selection dynamic on the individual without correctly assessing the reproductive, and thus evolutionary importance of the individual. Bacteria have tremendous individual selective power… given the potential results of geometric progression, any individual has the potential to turn a genetic mutation into an entirely new population. Similar potentials exist for “lower” life forms that each can produce thousands of offspring, which each can in turn produce thousands of offspring, again harnessing the power of geometric progression to make the selective/evolutionary potential of the individual massive.

This is not true for “higher” life forms with limited numbers of offspring, each of which need the investment of parental and social training to succeed. While reciprocal altruism is easily observed and widely documented it seems to operate on the level of the social group, which does indeed open the possibility of harnessing the power of the human desire for cooperation. Fighting against that is the social construct of industrialized individualism, necessary to feed humans as labor units into larger business and corporate organizations, regardless of their existing social groups and connections.

The human desire for social connection is now thwarted by the economic need to ally with jobs instead of social groups, and then often rechanneled into religious/political affiliation with potential for conflict on massive scales, witness our own politics or the Russian madness in Ukraine. A tough nut to crack…