I think the resistance comes from the fact that people like Dawkins and Maynard Smith have taken the bat to anyone who suggested anything beyond the above. As a result, here on the list, there may be some talking past each other going on. The more I think about it, the more I feel Chuck made some sort of typo or some such unintentional error when he wrote that evolution occurs not just at the level of the species. I think he meant instead "not just at the level of the individual".
Much as we may point to the fallacy of appeal to nature, there is some strength to such arguments, especially in the public eye. Conversely, when a scientific theory proposes that groups that exhibit a particular behaviour flourish in comparison to those that exhibit the opposite behaviour, and especially when that opposite behaviour is selfishness, then there is an understandable and defensible desire to use this claim in argument, and defend it against critiques.
IMHO, it is not the case that posters here are taking up the absurd notion that the individual doesn't matter at all -- rather (again IMHO) they are misreading the suggestion/claim, that the simplest accepted version of selection is (or until recently was) the well established one of individual selection, to mean the same as what Dawkins and others have at times meant i.e., there is nothing else but that.
--ravi