"It's more a gradual push in a certain direction. If food sources became higher because all the low stuff got eaten, animal heights would get incrementally higher in response, then the even high trees would survive better and an upward arms race would begin as the highest trees get selected."
This "gradual push" argument is something I've never really understood, because of the time scales involved for it to propagate through a population. Let's take the example of a giraffe, since that's the one you used. Let's say a giraffe mutates a neck that's 5cm longer than the one before it. Let's say this mutation occurs in oh, one out of a thousand giraffes, and that there's 80,000 giraffes. (This is how many giraffes there are in the world right now, according to some website.)
So in a given generation you'll have 80 giraffes with this mutation. Under basic Darwinist theories, the longer-necked giraffes will, over time, outbreed the shorter ones. But how long will this take?
Well, sure, a longer neck helps you get more food. But how much of an advantage to survival is the ability to get more food? A longer neck won't save you from being eaten by a lion, shot by a hunter, killed by a disease, struck by lightning in a thunderstorm, pushed over by African giraffe-tippers, etc... It only helps you in the rare case that you wouldn't be able to survive long enough to reproduce without a 5cm longer neck.
In what circumstances are those 80 giraffes going to be able to outbreed the remaining 79,920 enough to take over the population? Remember, a longer neck incurs disadvantages too (Needs more muscles/calories per day to hold it up, can't run as fast, harder to breathe, etc.)
This isn't even getting into the fact that if you only got the mutation for "a longer neck" on its own, all it's going to do is make your head snap off under its own weight. The muscle structures needed for a 10cm long neck and a 5 meter long neck are completely different, and require some serious modifications to the rest of the body, (stronger heart and lungs, more efficient digestion system to get the extra energy needed, probably some serious rewiring of the nerves to deal with the fact that the brain is now a car-length away from the rest of the body, and two or three hundred other things that I can't even imagine.)
And all of this stuff is supposed to happen randomly? All of it in concert? When lacking even one of them will cause your new long-neck giraffe's chances of survival to zero when he dies horribly?
I don't buy it. There's something else going on here, and we don't know what it is yet.
"Explanation #1: You genuinely misunderstood it. This is not very likely, considering you've read "The Selfish Gene" which provides an excellent explanation of all major aspects of evolution, and this includes the altruism you dabbled with in your text, and it shows how it helps not only groups but also individuals survive better (hint: altruism towards non-relatives is always coupled with an expectation of reciprocity).
Explanation #2: You don't really believe what you wrote, but have some agenda with this new stance of yours against evolution. This seems more likely to me, especially considering how systematic and thoughtful you've been on all subjects you've written in the past. There are no words to describe how shallow all the arguments in your article are, there's simply no way to embellish a turd to be something pretty, the theory of evolution has so many solid arguments accumulated to back it up (including how it applies to modern humans), I see any attack on it is doomed from the start.
Explanation #3: Maybe this is some kind of a prank, similar as your being imprisoned joke..."
This is very silly and you should be embarrassed for writing it. If you think there are flaws in the essay then say them. Don't just say "A bunch of smart people think evolution is right," and "I bet this is a prank of yours."
By the way, some quotes from the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, which is hardly a bastion of fundamentalist thought...
https://books.google.com/books?id=sdloAg...es&f=false
"Does natural selection explain [the phenomenon of declining birthrates in modern Europe]? Surely not, or at least not as natural selection is usually conceived."
"It should be obvious that there are plenty of changes to human populations that are not explained by natural selection..."