Abstract
Altruism has been defined as any action that increases the fitness of the recipient at the expense of the giver. Fitness is defined in Darwinian terms as the potential for an organism to spread its genes to the next generation. Earlier generations of behavioral biologists, observing the way social animals helped each other, came to the conclusion that they were acting for the good of the group or species as a whole. This theory has been displaced by the view that altruism can be wholly accounted for by the Darwinian process of mutation and natural selection acting on an individual to increase its own fitness. One of the strongest advocates of the "selfish gene" theory is Dawkins, who pointed out that natural selection works on genes, not individuals and, certainly, not on groups.