Altruism and the selfish gene

A couplr of comments. It doesn't require any sort of group consciousness (after all the point is that this behaviour is instinctive). What it means is that organisms can recognise close relatives and will tend to aid them in some situations where these promote survival of the genes for such behaviour.In the bird call example the behaviour persists because those that don't probably do not gain so much from not calling as they would lose if few or none called.The bee hive example is good BECAUSE worker bees do not reproduce - they can only aid the perpetuation of their genes by "altruistic behaviour". And they do.