One good book length counter-argument to "red in tooth and claw" is Robin Wright's "NonZero" (see summary site at http://www.nonzero.org/ http://www.nonzero.org

One good book length counter-argument to "red in tooth and claw" is Robin Wright's "NonZero" (see summary site at http://www.nonzero.org/ http://www.nonzero.org/ for excerpts) that argues life's arrow is toward more complexity based on cooperation and that it's not a "zero sum game" where every gain is someone else's loss. Wright's thesis for humanity is that people cooperate far more in the context of society than they did even 20,000 years ago, allowing for much larger populations. This larger population enables more diversity and further complexity.