Did Richard dawkin's "selfish gene" not move us beyond this point in the debate? With the focus on survival of the fittest _genes_ rather than the fittest organisms altruism seems far more logical.
The problem is that nobody knows what a "gene" is. It's a pseudoscientific term that implies we know where to find traits (which could be conserved by evolution) in a genome. We don't.
Regardless of how you define what a "gene" is, the "unit of selection" is a fragment of an organism's dna, not the organism itself. In this context Dawkin's explores an ESS(evolutionary stable strategy) that exhibits altruistic behaviour. It's also worth noting that group selection is shown to be unstable as an evolutionary strategy. This review of The Selfish Gene gives some good background http://www.miketuritzin.com/writing/review-the-selfish-gene/.
It's a lot like a binary diff, where phenotype is the source code, natural selection the programmer, and the genome the binary. Natural selection works on the phenotype, and you are saying that at all times the binary diff is compact, or sensible to talk about. Untrue. In fact it's trivially untrue because the genome is too small.
Group altruism is stable and is a very strong attractor of population behavior. All that's required is that group members be able to recognize one another.
http://people.brynmawr.edu/twong/models/pseudoaltruism.html
Individuals born into such a group may learn this or it may be genetically inherited (instinctual), or both. Of course the distinction between learning and instinct is also a bit fuzzy.
