Gahhh. This is the sort of stuff that boils my blood. You'd think that since "The Selfish Gene" was written over two decades ago, the basic point that selfish gene does not equal selfish person would have gotten through. But the reverse is a damn persistent meme. There was a book that came out a couple of years ago called "The Darwin Wars;" it began with the story of George Price, who went mad and killed himself after proving, through equations, some of the basic assumptions of selfish-gene thinking. As the author, Andrew Brown, writes, "though his equation showed that truly self-sacrificing behavior can exist among animals, and even humans, it also seemed to show that there is nothing noble in it." But why would nobility only exist in the absence of natural selection for it? That's ridiculous, and clearly an attempt for religion to monopolize morality. (Andrew Brown is, of course, a religion writer.) Isn't it more noble to try and overcome some of the cruel tendencies left over from our biological evolution than to deny that they could possibly exist?