Still, according to the great ethologist Jane Goodall, this book became a bestseller “in part, I think, because for many people it provided an excuse for human selfishness and cruelty. It was just our genes. We couldn’t help it… It was comforting perhaps to disclaim responsibility for our bad behavior.”32
I didn't think that at all. Altruism is something innate at the level of family and people we immediately come into contact with. Even then it's ruthlessly calculated to preserve the genes. Almost no one will innately die to save a single sibling and will only choose death to save two 50% of the time.
We have difficulty feeling sympathy for people we don't see.
With training we can change these altruistic mechanisms to incorporate more people but it requires training. We are not innately altruistic. To say we are innately more altruistic than the calculated altruism requires an evolutionary reason and there is none. It's an appeal to a non-existant higher purpose.
