In fact, the basic idea of The Selfish Gene is precisely a rejection of your previous statement: according to Dawkins, evolution is not concerned with the "propagation of the species", but with the propagation of individual genes. It is merely incidental that this sometimes results in competition among "survival machines", which happen to be grouped into species.

> Somehow, "civilization", "culture", and "society" have guided human development away from that model.

Nonsense. If that's your "statement", it's wrong. The entire field of sociobiology (read Wilson) speaks to phenomenon like "civilization", "culture", and "society" being driven solely by nucleotide replication.