Although it is a well-written book and Robert Wright is a clever journalist with a bent for spinning evolutionary just-so stories, he forgot to test his hypothesis. As a consequence he has paid the price by being wrong.
Does the history of our species show any evidence of higher purpose?
The system of inheritance of ideas is independent of the system of inheritance of genes. All this is pointing steadily to a difference in being human, to a complex mind indeed adapted for culture, that is, to a distinctive human genius.
Since genes are not moral agents, they cannot be selfish, and, equally, they cannot be altruistic. But genes can transmit information.
Each organism is in pursuit of—that is, values—its own proper life, which is all that the (nonhuman) individual organism either can or ought to pursue. It turns out, however, that values can be held intrinsically only as they are inclusively distributed.