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 Selfish Gene unit of heredity." However, he continues in a later chapter: Dawkins' later formulation is in his book "The Extended Phenotype" (1982), where the process of selection is taken to involve every possible phenotypical effect of a gene. Stephen Jay Gould finds Dawkins' position tries to have it both ways: The view of "The Selfish Gene" is that selection based upon groups and populations is rare compared to selection on individuals. Although supported by Dawkins and by many others, this claim continues to be disputed. While naïve versions of group selectionism have been disproved, more sophisticated formulations make accurate predictions in