Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts (2009)

Maybe an additional rule where the 20% with less points of the population of the groups with more points also dies. So there is actually an incentive for the individual that keep the points.

It seems to me that their interpreters often assume that identifying some behavior as evolutionary advantageous to an individual or group is somehow correlated with the goodness or desirability of that behavior. That's a fallacy. Whether the behavior is commendable, good, desirable, etc. is not related to its capability of increasing the long-term survival and spreading of someone's genes. (I'm not claiming everyone makes this association, but some seem to make it.)

Moreover, there seem to be countless examples of behavior that we are perfectly capable of and whose effect is difficult if not impossible to explain with evolutionary arguments. Some of them are considered commendable, other not. Random examples:

- spending your life in almost solitary confinement to solve some math problem

- deciding not to have children

- waging wars

- not passing your wealth on to your useless son and instead give everything to a charity

- being gay or asexual

- writing a novel without getting paid for it and that also doesn't increase your mating chances

The list could go on and on. Of course, evolutionary explanations may be constructed for any of them, but it's kind of doubtful that all human activities fit into this scheme. So my two points are:

a.) Whether altruistic behavior is good/desirable or not has nothing to do with its contribution to evolutionary fitness.

b.) Within some limits, we are perfectly capable of behaving in ways that are not evolutionary advantageous to us.

Finally, evolutionary models of social behavior that are not based on the genetic transmission of behavior simply do not have anything to do with real evolution. I've often seen real evolution being deliberately mixed up with ideas about the spreading on information contained in books, web pages, speech, etc. but I fail to see how the spreading of this information could be even remotely related to the way genes spread. Once you hear about a social fitness function or the fitness of a meme, you can in my opinion safely assume that the author pulled that concept out of his ass or copied it from others who did so.

Behaviours that groups exhibit will definitely be passed on from individual to individual and definitely have an effect on the ability of the group to survive.

And - whether something is passed on socially or through genes, it doesn't matter. 'Evolution' is not just a function of genes, obviously.

Your list of 'behaviours' is easy to describe, and I'll do it in context of your 'a' and 'b' positions.

From 'b' - "we are perfectly capable of behaving in ways that are not evolutionary advantageous to us" - obviously. But who cares? The species that takes up the best behaviours for it's environment will persist beyond those that do not.

From 'a' - Whether altruistic behavior is good/desirable or not has nothing to do with its contribution to evolutionary fitness. Yes it does. Run a little evolutionary simulation a a computer program. Create little 'bits' that evolve over time, and interact with one another - you'll see the bugs with the best social behaviours win - the others dissapear.

- " spending your life in almost solitary confinement to solve some math problem"

First off - this did not happen until way, way into human social development. Once we have complex social functions, it makes evolutionary sense to allocate some members of society towards 'very long term' thinking. 'The guy in the cave' is the same thing as a PhD today: someone who'd dedicated their life to something probably trivial or irrelevant, but which may have huge impact, possibly in the future.

- 'war' - war is perfectly understandable as selfish behaviour in the short run: a social group can 'get ahead' quickly by taking stuff of others.

- 'not passing on stuff to kids'. From a social perspective, it doesn't matter that much if the money goes to one's kids, or the neighbors kids. Both will contribute to group survival.

"I've often seen real evolution being deliberately mixed up with ideas about the spreading on information contained in books, web pages, speech, etc. but I fail to see how the spreading of this information could be even remotely related to the way genes spread"

It's very simple: an organism that learns how to read and write, and to pass down it's knowledge from generation to generation will 'out survive' ones that don't - and their genes are much more likely to be passed on.