Cooperation and altruism are scattered broadly throughout nature, as sciences such as field biology and ecology have abundantly documented. Furthermore, most major religious traditions teach that regard for the other is reflective of the divine in nature broadly and should be central to human life. In pondering these two facts, a number of important issues arise. On the science side, although Darwinian principles appear to account for the abundant empirical evidence of mutualistic, symbiotic, integrative relationships in the living world, altruism is particularly difficult to explain in terms of the core principle of natural selection, which implies that animals retain only those traits that confer their own reproductive success or that of their close relatives. On the religious side, altruism and love are extolled as central to what all of life is about – and altruism and cooperation in the animal kingdom are interpreted as symbolic of this theme in creation.