ABSTRACT
The problem Richard Dawkins was tackling in The Selfish Gene was a red-hot topic in the academic world at the time: at what level does natural selection occur—at the level of the gene, the individual, or the group? Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology laid the ground for the success of Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. It opened the debate about animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective, but was inaccessible to the general non-academic reader even though it was aiming for a wider audience. Group selection theory states that "characteristics that may be disadvantageous to an individual can persist or increase in the population if they contribute to the survival and reproduction of the group as a whole." Dawkins hoped to "help correct the unconscious group selectionism that then pervaded popular Darwinism." He singled out the writings of Wynne-Edwards and Ardrey and suggested "the apparent existence of individual altruism still has to be explained."
