When I say selfish, it's because the word has a certain meaning in biology and that's my background. I understand others who are not familiar with evolutionary theory might get confused by how I use the word, though.
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Originally Posted by Andrew Brown
"Selfish", when applied to genes, doesn't mean "selfish" at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: "the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process." This is a complicated mouthful. There ought to be a better, shorter word—but "selfish" isn't it.
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This is about selfish genes, but of course animals also behave selfish because the way they act is an expression of those selfish genes. Selfishness occurs when you have something that can replicate itself, is able to change (and improve) and compete with others for limited resources. Let's hypothesize the very start of life as something that started with a gene in a primordial soup that was able to use a resource to replicate itself. After doing so a number of times, there would be many and they would compete for those resources. When some mutate, new versions of that gene may appear that are better at replicating than the original genes, so they might outcompete the first ones. There's no concience behind it, one version drives the other to extinction simply because there is a selection for being better at replicating itself and since their needs overlap, the presence of one essentially kill the other. From this naturally occurring competition arises what we call selfishness and it's a quality that applies to all the genes that make up all organisms and so it is a fundamental "force" almost if you will in nature.