From struggling kids at school and messy office politics to larger issues like climate change and war, some problems just don't seem to go away.
But a growing group of renegade scientists say we could tackle these tricky problems by "evolving" kinder, more collaborative societies.
"We can change society, and can change it for the better," argues evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in the US.
He says experiments using his particular brand of evolutionary theory have shown encouraging kindness and collaboration in schools can help students on the cusp of dropping out, to thrive.
Professor Wilson is now keen to spread his tools for social change around the world, and despite his ideas flying in the face of the dominant view, they are gaining some traction.
Many animals, including humans, help each other out
And it generally involves some cost to the individual.
Worker ants sacrifice their ability to breed, bees tirelessly gather food for the hive, and vampire bats share food to keep their pals alive.
This behaviour puzzled Charles Darwin, who worried the self-sacrificing behaviour of some insects might be "fatal" to his theory.
He argued traits — think anything from black fur to aggressiveness — that offered an advantage in a given environment would determine who survived.
And according to the dominant interpretation of this natural selection theory, a gene, or the physical or behavioural trait it codes for, only spreads if this advantage is to the individual that possesses it.
Altruism, kindness and collaboration might be noble, but in a dog-eat-dog world, it would be paradoxical if altruistic behaviours, which didn't appear to directly benefit the individual, were selected to survive.
Enter the controversy.
Individuals, team players and group advantage
Most scientists think "prosocial" behaviours, such as kindness, evolved through natural selection acting on individuals.
But Professor Wilson and a small but growing band of scientists subscribe to a different idea.
They say that when it comes to kindness and collaboration, traits that give an advantage to a group play a role.
In other words, the group is "seen" by evolution as if it were a single individual — the controversial evolutionary theory known as "group selection".
Imagine a soccer team full of team players versus one full of ball hogs. The team players will win every time, and they will advance in the league.
"There is an evolutionary advantage in favour of prosocial behaviours, but it exists on the scale of between group interaction," says Professor Wilson.
But what about cheats — those individuals who act selfishly in an otherwise collaborative group. How do they thrive in this scenario?
To account for this, Professor Wilson and a colleague developed the idea of group selection into "multi-level selection theory".
This allows for different —and sometimes opposite — traits to be selected for at the group and individual level simultaneously.
Advantage for collaboration exists when groups compete, but at the same time selfish behaviours are selected for at the individual level.
Think of a soccer team with a flashy star that still advances in the league. The coach chooses to keep the star in the team, but the team still wins as most players collaborate.
The majority of scientists — including high-profile biologist Richard Dawkins and psychologist Steven Pinker — say the body of evidence does not support the ideas put forward by Professor Wilson and colleagues.
Australian evolutionary biologist Margo Adler is among the critics.
"It might look like group selection leading to altruism [but] it's still individual traits that are being selected for," Dr Adler says.
But historian of science Professor Oren Harmen of Bar Illan University in Israel says multilevel selection theory is breathing new life into group selection, which was once seen as "fuzzy science", or even "pseudoscience".
"Anyone who held the notion of group selection was ridiculed and made fun of."
Still, he says, while there is growing acceptance of multilevel selection theory, there remains "strong opposition" to the underlying concept of group selection.
Mapping kindness
Despite the controversy, Professor Wilson has pressed on to see if his ideas could be used in the real world to encourage kindness.
"If I wanted to study human altruism I needed to study it and in the real world," he says.
So he started a series of experiments in his neighbourhood of Binghamton in the US, and at the local school, designed to see if collaboration in a group could be selected for.
First he mapped where all the "prosocial" people lived — those people who would do kind things for others.
His research included surveys and experiments, including one that involved dropping addressed letters on the ground to see where in the neighbourhood people were most likely to pick them up and post them.
Professor Wilson found prosocial people tended to cluster around other prosocial people.
He reasoned this ensured nice people weren't exploited by mean people — in other words, this clustering was a result of people reacting to their social environments.
Creating environments that rewarded niceness seemed to encourage people to become nicer without having to be explicitly taught.
Evolving kinder kids
To further test his idea Professor Wilson created environments that rewarded niceness among a group of "at-risk" kids at the local public school.
"These were students who would almost certainly drop out. They had flunked three or more of their classes the previous year," he says.
Out of 117 at-risk kids who were in grades nine and 10, 56 were randomly chosen to be in the study.
A program was then designed which gave the students short term incentives for cooperation and learning, praised positive performance and empowered them to make decisions about how they would like to learn.
The results were fast and dramatic.
Students who participated in the study not only showed more prosocial behaviour, but their marks shot up.
Those on the cusp of dropping out began receiving marks on par with the rest of the school, says Professor Wilson.
These results prove to him that you can select for collaborative behaviours by rewarding them — just like traits are selected for when they help an animal reproduce.
And just as selected traits are passed down to the next generation, rewarding the right behaviours would result in the evolution of kindness within a person.
The end result is more kindness and success among people, both at the individual and the group level.
What excites Professor Wilson about his results is that he believes that lessons learned from this work can be scaled up to inform policy made for neighbourhoods, states, businesses and even nations.
But is it evolution?
Not everyone is convinced that what Professor Wilson has observed is a case of evolution.
Dr Adler, for example, argues that rapid change within a generation like this is adaptation, not evolution.
"Showing that people are very adaptable, and if you alter people's environment people will change their behaviour is not proving evolution is at work," she says.
"There are so many reasons why it's hard to interpret what humans do, as opposed to, for example, fruit flies.
It can also be hard to prove cause and effect when it comes to evolution and humans, she adds.
"It could be the case that he's enabling people to be their best selves, but I don't understand why he ties it to evolutionary theory.
But while some may still be arguing over terminology, others are already implementing Professor Wilson's ideas.
Using such approaches, Australian National University behavioural scientist Robert Styles has advised institutions on how to work in more harmonious and efficient ways.
He argues for the adoption of the ideas to tackle problems from climate change to violence against women
"The responses to the challenges we face this century are not adequate," Professor Styles says.
"In order to reconceive of our responses to the challenges we face we need to adopt an evolutionary lens."
