ABSTRACT
We have seen above that the dominant force in Darwinian evolution – the force that accounts for the pervasive adaptedness of organisms to their environments, and thus for their ongoing evolution – is natural selection. In this process, whatever heritable traits promote an individual’s survival and reproduction will automatically tend to increase in the population by virtue of that individual’s reproductive success compared to others. In the course of perpetuating and reproducing themselves, individuals compete for whatever resources are in short supply, and through this competition they are exposed to selection. Therefore, biological adaptation, biological diversity, and evolution itself are, and have always been, the results of individual characteristics or behavior that tend to preserve and perpetuate the individual’s own genes – in other words, to put it crudely but not really anthropomorphically, the results of selfishness.2
