What do people think about Altruism and The Price Equation?

The Price Equation is:

Quote from wikipedia

Price's equation is a theorem; it is a statement of mathematical fact between certain variables, and its value lies in the insight gained by assigning certain values encountered in evolutionary genetics to the variables. It provides us a way to understand the effects that gene transmission and natural selection have on the proportion of genes within each new generation of a population.

Basically when dealing with altruism, it says that true altruism doesn't exist and it's just an "illusion" to make sure your genes get passed on. Thus, making it a selfish act.

Here's a Wikipedia article on The Price Equation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_equation#Example:_Evolution_of_altruism

Also the video from where I got this topic from:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYdgcKjbp3Y

Quote from Preserve

Basically when dealing with altruism, it says that true altruism doesn't exist and it's just an "illusion" to make sure your genes get passed on. Thus, making it a selfish act.

Uhh, that's not really what it's saying at all. The Price equation explicitly defined altruism as "the genetic predisposition to behavior which decreases individual fitness while increasing the average fitness of the group to which the individual belongs". The rest is a mathematical model to weigh the loss of individuals due to their altruistic behavior against the increase in the group's overall fitness due to that behavior, which would increase the size of the group and number of altruistic individuals within it.

None of that points to altruism being selfish, since it's literally defined as behavior that benefits others at the expense of the individual.


Moved to the debate section.

I'm not much of a science buff, but I am frequently interested in it. Could anyone tell me what the go-to evolutionary explanation for altruism is? Is this at the top of the list? Altruism is always something that's confused me, from a non-religious standpoint.

There isn't a universal explanation. If you bring evolution into it, it assumes altruism is a genotype randomly expressed within a population, but then you need to account for randomness, environmental influences and other factors that would effect the phenotypic expression of an "altruism gene". There are scientific research papers that go in-depth on the topic, some of them seem to suggest that mate selection within groups would favor altruistic behavior over selfish behavior, but there are different theories and they're all too complex to summarize in a way that's easy to understand.