The collision between Hamiltonian kin selection (defended most prominently in this case by Richard Dawkins) and group selection (E. O. Wilson)

There really isn’t a debate anymore between Dawkins and Wilson. In his most recent work, Wilson adopts Dawkins’ gene selection view and his “extended phenotype” concept, although he persists in using the term “group selection”.

From Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”:

Selection has remained at the individual level, queen to queen. Yet selection in the insect societies continues at the group level, with colony pitted against colony. This seeming paradox is easily resolved. As far as natural selection in most forms of social behavior is concerned, the colony is operationally only the queen and her phenotypic extension in the form of robot-like assistants.

And of course the usual argument about large societies, is that large human groups are basically fictive kin selection; people fooling themselves into seeing their comrades as brothers, thus using kin-selected psychology.

Yes, and this is quite evident from how larger organizations, from religions to nation-states, exploit this kin-selected psychology. – “brothers and sisters in Christ”, “Muslim Brotherhood”, the fatherland, motherland, etc. They tend to employ kinship language and get their adherents to view their fellow adherents like their close family members:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/three-american-teens-recruited-online-are-caught-trying-to-join-the-islamic-state/2014/12/08/8022e6c4-7afb-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html

“I am . . . obliged to pay taxes to the [U.S.] government,” Hamzah Khan wrote. “This in turn will be used automatically to kill my Muslim brothers and sisters. . . . I simply cannot sit here and let my brothers and sisters get killed, with my own hard-earned money. . . . I cannot live under a law in which I’m afraid to speak my beliefs. I want to be ruled by the Sharia [Islamic law]. . . . Me living in comfort with my family while my other family are getting killed is plain selfish.”

And the likely reason they have to exploit this kin selected psychology is because dying for others is generally not a good strategy:

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/your-countrys-not-your-blood/

I think Dawkins’ extended phenotype paradigm is a good explanation for what Wilson regards as group selection. Dying for others is not a good strategy, but getting others to die for you can be a good strategy. A gene or genes that can get other gene complexes or organisms to serve its interests in concert can obviously be a good strategy for the particular gene or genes. The group is the extended phenotype of the gene.