The Evolution of Cooperation on. When Richard Dawkins set out to "examine the biology of selfishness and altruism" in "The Selfish Gene", he reinterpreted the basis of evolution, and therefore of altruism. He was "not advocating a morality based on evolution", and even felt that "we "must" teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature." But John Maynard Smith was showing that behavior could be subject to evolution, Robert Trivers had shown that reciprocal altruism is strongly favored by natural selection to lead to complex systems of altruistic behavior (supporting Kropotkin's argument that cooperation is as
The Evolution of Beauty that was adapted from "The Evolution of Beauty", stating that it is "both erroneous and confusing, for it misrepresents sexual selection, natural selection, and modern evolutionary theory." He later described the book as a "mixed bag" but stated that the bad parts outweighed the good, and stated that Prum's arguments were "tendentious". Evolutionary biologists Gerald Borgia and Gregory Ball state that Prum misrepresents opposition of scientists to the model of runaway selection and that he fails to make a case for its ubiquity. Further, they claim Prum inappropriately injects politics into biology, conflating eugenics and genocide with female mate choice