Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.
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CB: This part - "we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive." - Alan and Matthias correctly criticize as evidencing lack of understanding of evolution. The kindness is not "evolving" us now. We already have a natural tendency to kindness. We evolved kindness hundreds of thousands of years ago and it conferred fitness on us way back when. Kindness is human natural from long ago.
This part - "his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits." and the reference to vulnerable condition of the early humans being overcome by cooperation gets at a profound truth , countering social darwinist , bourgeois ideological myths about rugged individualism as human nature etc.
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In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.
They call it "survival of the kindest."
"Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others," said Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. "Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct."