ABSTRACT
Three of the most honored and, in terms of publications, best-selling evolutionary biologists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson—profoundly disagree on the processes of evolution. This chapter shows that the biologists agree that humans are, increasingly, a cooperative species. They believe that cooperation is a powerful drive within human nature that serves us more effectively than conflict. Gould’s hierarchical approach, of course, offers the species as a unit of selection, an idea inherent in what is perhaps his greatest contribution to evolutionary biology, the concept of punctuated equilibrium. Wilson’s individual-group conflict recalls Kropotkin’s “double tendency” of humans toward both self-interest and cooperation. In Wilson’s individual-group conflict recalls Kropotkin’s “double tendency” of humans toward both self-interest and cooperation.
