love and other "unselfish" behaviors One irritation of being an evolutionary theorist is frequently having to read your views cast in straw man form by their opponents. This CS Monitor article, for example -- to argue that religious ideas are needed to explain love -- invokes an appalling mischaracterization of evolutionary psychology:

For years now, evolutionary scientists have insisted that, outside close-kin relationships, all caring acts are motivated by self-interest and calculation. The "selfish gene" theory permeates wide realms of contemporary life.

But this simply isn't true. Evolutionary psychologists draw a careful distinction between "selfish genes" and selfish people. Steven Pinker, for instance, writes

People don't have the goal of propagating their genes; people have the goal of pursuing satisfying thoughts and feelings. Our genes have the metaphorical goal of building a complex brain in which the satisying thoughts and feelings were linked to acts that tended to propagate those genes in the ancient environment in which we evolved.

And Richard Dawkins argues:

RICHARD DAWKINS: The self-interest of genes can be accomplished by programming non-selfish behavior at higher levels at levels of, say, the organism. PAUL SOLMAN: Cooperation? RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes. PAUL SOLMAN: Love? RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes, love if love leads to the survival of selfish genes, which it often does.

Now I'm the first to admit that evolutionary scientists have a yet-incomplete understanding of (and even competing theories of) love and other "unselfish" behaviors. But the suggestion -- based on a clearly false assertion -- that such behaviors "constitute an unresolved evolutionary quandary" and that evolutionary science focuses only on "the negative, deficit, or disease model of human nature" represents an extremely disingenuous attempt to keep evolutionary science from kicking religion out the door.