Darwinian Context
Charles Darwin's theory of how evolution works ("By Means of Natural Selection") is explicitly competitive ("survival of the fittest"), Malthusian ("struggle for existence"), even gladiatorial ("nature, red in tooth and claw"). Species are pitted against species for shared resources, similar species with similar needs and niches even more so, and individuals within species most of all. All this comes down to one factor: out-competing all rivals and predators in producing progeny.
Darwin's explanation of how preferential survival of the slightest benefits can lead to advanced forms is the most important explanatory principle in biology, and extremely powerful in many other fields. Such success has reinforced notions that life is in all respects a war of each against all, where every individual has to look out for himself, that your gain is my loss.
In such a struggle for existence altruism (voluntarily yielding a benefit to a non-relative) and even cooperation (working with another for a mutual benefit) seem so antithetical to self-interest as to be the very kind of behavior that should be selected against. Yet cooperation and seemingly even altruism have evolved and persist, and naturalists have been hard pressed to explain why.
Read more about this topic: Evolution Of Cooperation
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—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
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—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)