I think that altrusim that involves the death of the individual seems very hard to understand. But in general there doesn't seem to be much trouble explaining c

I think that altrusim that involves the death of the individual seems very hard to understand. But in general there doesn't seem to be much trouble explaining cooperation. In the paper "Kropotkin Was No Crackpot" by Stephen Jay Gould he states "Kropotkin therefore created a dichotomy within the general notion of struggle – two forms with opposite import: (1) organism against organism of the same species for limited resources, leading to competition; and (2) organism against environment, leading to cooperation." The really interesting thing is that the paper also explains why certain societies are more collective than others e.g. Russians Vs English people. Darwin admitted a second form of struggle "metaphorical" that pits organism against the harshness of surrounding physical environments, not against other members of the same species. However Darwin's focus was mainly on the other form of struggle which pitted individual against individual in a gladatorial struggle. The Russians could not understand this "It was foreign to their experience because, quite simply, Russia’s huge land mass dwarfed its sparse population. For a Russian to see an inexorably increasing population inevitably straining potential supplies of food and space required quite a leap of imagination." So their environment influenced their politics which seems natural enough and refreshing to me as it always seems that a more social economy is some kind of artificial thing that is forced on people by intellectuals and goes against our nature as murderous individuals. Of course we are also murderously competitive individuals but the point is that in certain environments you won't survive if you don't cooperate.