Dawkins doesn't actually argue that humans are fundamentally selfish. Dawkins acknowledges that altruistic behaviour does exists in nature, but that this behaviour has always been a challenge to explain, and that earlier theories proposed, such as group selection or kin selection have irreconcilable flaws. What Dawkins says is that altruism can be explained if we do away with the notion of the species, or the group or even individual being the fundamental unit of selection, but rather accept the gene as the basic unit of heredity. That is what matter is not so much whether the individual survives but whether the gene survives. Dawkins is using poetic licence in his use of the word "selfish", and for this reason I think he has been misunderstood.

"Dawkins waited until the very last sentence of The Selfish Gene to reassure us that, in fact, we are welcome to chuck all of those genes out the window: “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Dawkins 1976: 215). The break with nature is obvious in this statement, as is the uniqueness of our species. More recently, Dawkins (1996) has declared us “nicer than is good for our selfish genes,” and explicitly endorsed Huxley: “What I am saying, along with many other people, among them T. H. Huxley, is that in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don’t want to live in a Darwinian world""

SYapse, have you actually read the Selfish Gene? Or the Blind Watchmaker or any of Dawkin's books on evolutionary biology? I have a sense the answer is no.

Here is a section from the Selfish Gene which I have here on my lap as I write:

"If you look at the way natural selection works, it *seems* to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish. Therefore when we go and look at the behaviours of baboons, humans, and all other living creatures, we shall find it to be selfish. If we find that our explanation is wrong, if we observe that human behaviour is truly altruistic, then we are faced with something puzzling, something that needs explaining."

Dawkins goes on to define altruism:

"An entity, such as a baboon, is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another entity's welfare at the expense of its own. Selfish behaviour has exactly the opposite effect. [...] It is important to realise that the above definitions of altruism and selfishness are behavioural, not subjective. I am not concerned with the psychology of motives. I am not going to argue about whether people who behave altruistically are 'really' dong it for secret or subconscious motives. Maybe they are or maybe they aren't and maybe we can never know, but in any case that is not what this book is about. My definition is concerned with whether the effect of an act is to lower or raise the survival prospects of the presumed altruist and the survival prospects of the presumed beneficiary".

Dawkins provides many examples of altruistic behaviour in the book and explains why theories such as kin selection must be wrong, and offers instead a gene-centred view of natural selection, which he claims resolves the ostensible incompatabilty of natural selection with altruism. This is why the books is called the selfish gene and not the selfish animal.

In answer to your question. No I don't believe that humans are generally fundamentally selfish. We can be selfish at times, but we are also frequently (at times irrationally) altruistic and that this is part of our nature, a nature which which is product of evolution by natural selection. Of course there are shades of grey, some people are more altruistic than others, and some are more selfish. But being the social animals that we are, our altruistic nature is just as important as our selfish nature.

Sorry SYapse I see now you were quoting Franz de Waal - well it would seem to me that he has misunderstood Richard Dawkins on this topic.

is he thinks that there is a conflict between altruistic tendencies and natural selection then he doesnt understand natural selection. most of it happens to entire groups. you have one group of ants living in one hole in your backyard that all look out for themselves, another group of ants that work as a collective. the former group my die out. eventually you are left with collectives.

natural selection usually favors efficient ways of doing things. because it is an anarchist system. if having every member of a group be selfish is somehow more efficient, then that trait will become popular. in terms of self-sacrifice, if people evolved in groups where most of the other people are genetically related to them and the group had an extremely high risk of dying out, then even self-sacrifice can be favored by evolution. but even with that, there isnt too much self-sacrifice going on. so i really dont see a conflict.

blankflag what you have described you have described is called kin selection, and on the surface seems to work for social insects like ants and bees. Most of the individuals in the group are sterile as only the queen produces off spring. Thus the members of ant colony are all closely related, sharing more than half of their genes (half from the queen and the rest from a limited number of males). Therefore a female ant, bee, or wasp who helps her sister (that is, the “queen”) produce offspring will, on the average, cause more copies of her genes to be passed to the next generation.

BUT what about altruism amongst members of a species who are not closely related?

I've said this before on this forum, and I'll say it again here: I consider human altruism evolutionarily explicable in the same manner as is sickle cell anemia. Conducting oneself in such a way so as not to piss off everybody else and have them kill you, e.g. being cooperative, is without a doubt a mark of evolutionary fitness. Extreme "cooperation" like throwing oneself in front of a bus to save an infertile (for the sake of argument) man is a behavior that in fact detracts from evolutionary fitness but which stems from the same predisposition allowing for cooperation which aids fitness.

if you have group A and group B trying to survive in a wilderness that is so brutal that only one group will survive, then the group that is the most efficient will.

this 'altruism' is meant, in terms of evolution, to result in the greatest efficiency for the group. for example, someone jumps into a lake to save someone else. the chance of his dying is much lower than the chance of his saving a life, so overall it is best for the group.

if the group survives then the people in that group survive - the altruistic people. if the other group dies then the people in that group die - the selfish people. you dont need any connection with the other members of the group other than you are in the same group for this to happen.

So, blankflag, which do you think survived the most? :)

if we get to a global community where there are no groups and everything is just centralized then we will probably evolve-out our altruism.

it also depends on how stable the groups are. if you are in a situation where people live in the same group their whole lives, then evolution will push people to be more altruistic. i dont think that is happening much in modern times, so we are probable evolving away from altruism.

But altruism no longer determines who survives - I'm not sure anything does except location and opportunity. Poor people in Bangladesh die, everyone in the UK, for example, has the opportunity to reproduce. How can natural selection work in this circumstacnce?

'@ synapse Your last post illustrates a key point ignored by, for example, Dawkins. Many biologists stick somewhat simplistically to the interplay between genetics and the environment as, if you will, the sole drivers, ignoring the fact that living creatures play a key role in determining that very environment.
I can do no better than quote Lewontin on this:
'' every kind of organism, as a consequence of its life activities, reforms the world around itself and creates its own “ecological niche” that is in constant flux as the organism behaves and metabolizes. Organisms do not “fit into” niches, they construct them, and biologists’ realization of this fact has led to the creation of theories of “niche construction.”4 It is not simply that birds and ants build nests or humans build houses. The metaphor of “construction” covers a number of activities of metabolizing creatures that create the world around themselves. Plants, putting down roots, change the physical structure of the soil in which they are growing and they extrude into the soil chemicals that encourage the growth of certain fungi. These molds, far from “infecting” the plants, form intimate connections with the roots that are a pathway for substances that promote plant growth.''
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/not-so-natural-selection/?pagination=false

''I've said this before on this forum, and I'll say it again here: I consider human altruism evolutionarily explicable in the same manner as is sickle cell anemia.''

I hate the word ‘’evolution’’ in the context of the theory of natural selection. If you look up the word in the dictionary it just means change. Who in their right mind in isolation can argue against change? Those of us who have some doubts and qualifications are therefore almost on a loser from the start by going along with the terminology, however, moving on.
As you raise it lets talk about sickle cell anaemia in the context of altruism. First a couple of premises that the natural selection hypotheses dictates that we accept;
1) The underlying mechanism for evolutionary change is proposed to be genetic mutation, which confers an advantage to the organism in both a particular and randomly formed environment (although please see my last post which questioned the randomness of the environment).
2) Every species of living thing that has ever existed has evolved from a pre-existing species (apart from the very first, but that is for another very interesting debate). A new species might be said to be in place when the genotypes are sufficiently different, so as to grossly forestall interbreeding.
A fact on sickle cell anaemia:
1) Although the genotype results in a phenotype which expresses itself as pathology of the blood, it does confer resistance to the malaria parasite carried by the mosquito.
Now let us imagine a world of runaway global warming where the mosquito becomes much more geographically extensive then it is now. We might also imagine a world where civil chaos means that insecticide and/or medicine supply is interrupted to the general population. Or perhaps, my favourite, a world where the mosquito and/or malaria parasite have themselves evolved to be immune to any containing measures and/or drugs we humans might employ. It is changes in the environment such as these which are often quoted as being the drivers of evolution. (Although, it is a little beside the point to discuss the gradualism v. catastrophic competing evolutionary theories. I can do that if you like; I have in mind the long neck of the giraffe as an example)
The guys who have sickle cell anaemia will then be at a distinct advantage. They will almost certainly go on to form distinct communities of fit individuals and evolve further advantages characteristics. We might then call them a proto-species or, if you prefer a race. Now I can hear the rebuttals already along the lines of – ‘’oh, but we humans are different, we have air travel and geographical isolation could not possibly apply to us’’. Anthropocentric piffle, you either embrace the idea of a multi-billion year chronology of evolution (the interaction of differing genotypes on a random environment) of which we are but an infinitesimally tiny part, or you don’t.
Viewed in this context any idea of an altruism which applies to the whole species or, if you prefer, the human race, is romantic nonsense. A reciprocal altruism purely based on our own kin group or as I prefer to put it our ‘’hunter gather group’’ might have some legs. I would only caution that you should be careful what you wish for.
To give credit where it is due I believe that Dawkins himself, in the context of the human race has made an appeal for us to rise up our evolutionary origins (or was it impulses?).
Some of us, however, believe in true altruism or, if you prefer, a brotherhood of man, for other reasons, which are perhaps not strictly relevant to this discussion. Just to note that there is an alternative point of view.

"The underlying mechanism for evolutionary change is proposed to be genetic mutation"

This is WIDELY disputed.

What did you have in mind?

Active evolution. For example, it has been documented that children born to older parents are liable to live longer [citation needed]. Now a lot of scientists are starting to propose that how we act in life echoes in the genetics passed onto our children, rather than evolution consisting purely of mutations.

this is semantics. if you define evolution as genetic changes, then it is caused by genetic mutation. if you define evolution as 'advancement' of the species or some other nebulous concept, then it is a bunch of random things coming from nature and society and the balance of power and who has the power that makes the biggest difference.

Also artificial selection. For example in The Forest People by Colin Turnbull, he documents a case where an unaltruistic hunter was exiled from the tribe. We choose which traits are valuable and propagate them, sometimes killing people with the traits we don't like. This seems to bypass natural selection.

I'm just saying my thought processes out loud, by the way. I don't have a solidified theory of evolution or anything.

"Active evolution"

This sounds like Lamarkian evolution. I recall there was professor at the University of Wollongong who was an advocate of this notion, but I think it is way outside the mainstream view at this stage.

The Darwinian algorithm: variation (mutation), heredity, selection, differential survival

If you put all these together you MUST have evolution. The fact that humans can actively participate via selective breeding, I don't think negates the principle of *natural* selection. Artificial selection may speed up the process but the core principles are exactly the same.

So we seem to have a consensus that there is no such thing as (pure) altruism under the evolutionary hypothesise. What we might have is a recipricol altruism purely based on family or hunter gather group or race.

Seems like the Nazis had it right all along on this bit of science: http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Hitler-Evolutionary-Eugenics-Germany/dp/140397201X

"What we might have is a reciprocal altruism purely based on family or hunter gatherer group or race."

Actually it goes beyond that. Reciprocal altruism also extends between species and even between kingdoms.

Regarding your other point about pure altruism. Yes this exists. Clearly. But whether or not pure altruism exists is a different question that how and why the tendency towards altruistic behavior evolved. It's related in that in that it raises the question - why is there altruism? But identifying an evolutionary mechanism not negate the fact that pure altruism exists.

I don't get your last point about Nazi's. I think you might be implying that if you accept natural selection that you are a Nazi? If so, I don't follow. I think that might be a non sequitur.