>Researchers have proposed different possible mechanisms to explain cooperation. Kin selection suggests that helping family members ultimately helps the individual.
This is wrong and should significantly reduce any trust you may have had in the journalist who wrote the piece. Kin selection is about how helping family members helps the genes that make the individual. Behaviour will spread if it increases inclusive fitness. If you can save a sibling (coefficient of relatedness 0.5) with probability 1 and the chance of you dying is 0.4 you do it. If P(death) is 0.51 or higher you don't.
>Group selection proposes that cooperative groups may be more likely to survive than uncooperative ones.
The conditions necessary for group selection are incredibly strong and very rarely occur in practice in biological settings. When they do you get hive organisms like naked mole rats or the Hymenoptera. There is stronger evidence for group selection in cultural evolution than in most of biology.
Further reading http://lesswrong.com/lw/kw/the_tragedy_of_group_selectionism
>“As mutations that increase the temptation to defect sweep through the group, the population reaches a tipping point,” Plotkin said. “The temptation to defect is overwhelming, and defection rules the day.”
>Plotkin said the outcome was unexpected. “It’s surprising because it’s within the same framework — game theory — that people have used to explain cooperation,” he said. “I thought that even if you allowed the game to evolve, cooperation would still prevail.”
>The takeaway is that small tweaks to the conditions can have a major effect on whether cooperation or extortion triumphs. “It’s quite neat to see that this leads to qualitatively different outcomes,” said Jeff Gore, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wasn’t involved in the study. “Depending on the constraints, you can evolve qualitatively different kinds of games.”
Mathematicians develop model that gives us a deeper understanding of the shallowness of our understanding of cooperation.
Unfortunately my math isn't strong enough to understand the paper but you'll get a much better understanding of how game theory applies to biology from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins than from this article.
Don't read anything by Stephen Jay Gould
http://pleiotropy.fieldofscience.com/2009/02/krugman-on-step...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#The_Mismeasur...
In 2011, a study conducted by six anthropologists reanalyzed Gould's claim that Samuel Morton unconsciously manipulated his skull measurements,[82] and concluded that Gould's analysis was poorly supported and incorrect. They praised Gould for his "staunch opposition to racism" but concluded, "we find that Morton's initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved."[83] Ralph Holloway, one of the co-authors of the study, commented, "I just didn't trust Gould. ... I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of 'The Mismeasure of Man' came and he never even bothered to mention Michael's study, I just felt he was a charlatan."[84] The group's paper was reviewed in the journal Nature, which recommended a degree of caution, stating "the critique leaves the majority of Gould's work unscathed," and notes that "because they couldn't measure all the skulls, they do not know whether the average cranial capacities that Morton reported represent his sample accurately."[85] The journal stated that Gould's opposition to racism may have biased his interpretation of Morton's data, but also noted that "Lewis and his colleagues have their own motivations. Several in the group have an association with the University of Pennsylvania, and have an interest in seeing the valuable but understudied skull collection freed from the stigma of bias."