David Sloan Wilson wants to bury a bad idea

UPDATE on The "Theorum" of Evolution: David Sloan Wilson has posted a response to the review of The Age of Empathy on SEED.

To me Wilson is  most poignant with this remark.

"Evolution helps explain all behaviors. The idea that evolution explains selfishness well and altruism poorly is so dead that it is beginning to smell. Can we please bury it now? Evolution explains the full range of behaviors, from extreme selfishness to extreme altruism. What evolves in any particular case depends upon the underlying environmental conditions, which are fairly well specified by now. No one should be surprised anymore by the raw fact that kindness exists in nature. The frontier of science has moved on to a more refined set of questions."

With this in mind I think it still possible to move forward with the argument that it behooves humanity to learn from successful survival strategies in nature if we hope to achieve actual sustainability in terms of current  global zoological/botanical survival. Humans avoiding extinction by helping each other and our phylogenetic cousins avoid extinction as well.