In the linked article I was referring to, there was a section entitled "Why Men Rape." It mentioned two hypotheses to why men developed the tendency to rape....
Did it mention the hypothesis that rape is a product of the education and upbringing of the individual and has nothing to do with hereditary factors, and so has nothing to do with natural selection?
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...survival of the fittest only applies to individuals....
Indeed it does, which is why "survival of the fittest" is not the same as "natural selection" -- "survival of the fittest" is one aspect of natural selection where each individual is in competition with others of its species, where "natural selection" takes into account all ways that a hereditary characteristic can expand in a population due to the reproductive success of the individuals carrying it.
In the case of altruism (and presumably the ability toward morality and empathy in humans), the individuals in a group that has an innate drive toward cooperation can flourish as compared to a population where each individual acts only in its immediate self-interest. And when cooperation is coupled with an ability to detect "slackers" and "cheaters" and a drive to retaliate against them, egoists would be at a disadvantage in such a group of cooperators.
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particular traits would not be selected for unless they provided immediate survival advantages. It seems to me that the benefits of morality would be too long term, and morality traits would never prevail.
A group that cooperates will produce more food and other resources, on average, and offer more protection against predators than a group where each individual acts only for its immediate self-interest. A sick egoist, for example, will produce no food and may starve -- a sick cooperator will recieve extra food gather by other cooperators. A egoist parent has to juggle caring for young while it tries to gather food -- cooperative parents may share the caring of young so that individuals may devote more time to food gathering -- a division of labor that may lead to more efficiency. So, in the end, on average, cooperators may very well have more offspring.
Now an individual egoist may have more offspring than a typical cooperator, but over all fewer egoists get the chance to have offspring at all -- on average, more cooperators are born and survive to reproductive age than egoists.
By the way, this has been modelled mathematically. It does work. In computer simulations, cooperators have a reproductive advantage over egoists. Your very simple theoretical objections, while intuitive, are too simple -- more complete theoretical arguments show that, in fact, cooperation is a beneficial behavior in terms of survival and propagation of the relevant genes.
Edited by Chiroptera, : clarity
Progress in human affairs has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests. -- E. H. Carr
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