Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

existed in the immediate ancestors of modern humans (such as
Homo ergaster; Homo Habilis). The moral sense evolved,
along with all other human behaviors, feelings, and thought
patterns, throughout that time. No individual or society can
come along and invent a new kind of morality and expect it to
work. Ethics, Shermer insists, must be based upon the behavior
patterns that have proven successful over evolutionary time
in the human species. Rather than doing what one thinks God
told him or her to do, or whatever one wants, one should do
what has worked for thousands of years in the human species.
It has been popular among religious communities to
claim that evolutionary beliefs lead to total immorality. Without
God, they claim, humans behave like animals. Shermer
disagrees. For one thing (as famously pointed out by author
Mark Twain), most animals do not “behave like animals.”
Despite the recent discovery of warfare among chimpanzees,
humans still stand out as the species that is perhaps most
cruel to its fellow members. Nonhuman animals may, indeed,
“behave better” than humans.
For another thing, natural selection has favored some
types of morality. This is how it happened, according to
Shermer. Some behavior patterns worked, and the individuals
(and the societies in which they lived) prospered as a result. An
example is honesty. A person might gain a temporary advantage
by being dishonest, but eventually other members of society
will detect a repeated pattern of dishonesty. People who are
generally honest will prosper by the goodwill of others within
a social network (see altruism). Natural selection also favors
the ability to detect even the most subtle hints of dishonesty in
other people. Therefore, natural selection has not only favored
honest behavior but also a feeling of satisfaction that accompanies
honest behavior. People who not only were honest, but
also wanted to be honest, were most successful at gaining status,
resources, and mates, allowing the production of children,
who inherited their genes and learned honest behavior patterns
from honest parents. (This discussion omits situations in which
ethical dilemmas arise.) The same argument would apply to
stealing, murder, and adultery as to dishonesty.
What does one get when one adds all of this together?
The result is the evolution of conscience. The result is what
traditional religion calls The Golden Rule (Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you) and philosophers call
the Categorical Imperative (Do those things that, if everybody
did them, would result in the kind of world you would
like to live in). This explains why it feels good to be good;
to be moral, Shermer says, is as human as to be hungry or
horny. This would also explain the negative side of the issue:
why humans feel shame for immorality. Although the specific
behaviors that elicit feelings of shame and guilt may differ
from one society to another, the feelings themselves are
universal. Evolutionary ethics explains why, as Shermer says,
most people are good most of the time.
Likewise, an evolutionary approach explains why human
morality is different from the behavior patterns of other animal
species. There is no selective advantage of honesty among
birds, for example, because they are not smart enough to recognize
and remember which individual birds are honest and
which are not. The ability to recognize and remember which
individual is a friend and which is not may be the principal
evolutionary ethics
force behind the evolution of our higher mental characteristics
(see intelligence, evolution of; language, evolution
of) and even the human moral sense. As the product of
evolution and environment, the human moral sense has both
universal truths and situational variations.
One major difference between evolutionary ethics and
traditional religious ethics, says Shermer, is that traditional
ethics identifies some things as 100 percent right, others as
100 percent wrong. Shermer claims that it is necessary to
replace this absolutist logic with what mathematicians call
fuzzy logic. A behavior pattern may be wrong most of the
time, but beneficial under rare circumstances; it might, therefore,
be 10 percent right. Another behavior pattern might be
good most of the time but detrimental under rare circumstances
and be 90 percent right. The human legal system and
common sense already recognize this (for instance, by distinguishing
murder from manslaughter), and it is time that
human ethical systems incorporate it also. Ethical principles
can be 100 percent right or wrong only if they are transcendental,
which, Shermer insists, they are not.
Many scholars believe that evolutionary ethics cannot lead
to a completely satisfactory society or personal life. Although
many of the behavior patterns that worked during prehistoric
times, during which time almost all human evolution occurred,
will work today, many will not. Throughout human prehistory,
natural selection may have favored morality within societies,
but did not favor friendliness between competing societies.
Perhaps the human tendency to go to war has a genetic basis,
but even if it does not, human antipathy toward outsiders definitely
does seem ineradicably genetic. Nearly everybody agrees
that the time has long passed for humans to use war as a solution
to problems. In light of this, it is difficult to surpass the
judgment that a close friend of Charles Darwin (see Huxley,
Thomas Henry) placed upon evolutionary ethics. Instead of
deriving morality from evolution, said Huxley, a human’s duty
consists of resisting natural impulses: “Let us understand, once
for all, that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating
the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but
in combating it.” Huxley primarily intended his statement to
be against the simplistic political application of “survival of the
fittest” (see eugenics), but it could also apply today at least in
part to evolutionary ethics.
Other philosophers and evolutionary scientists have
emphasized the fact that evolution need not produce violent
competition. Evolution can lead to mutualism as readily as
to antagonism (see coevolution; symbiogenesis). Thomas
Henry Huxley said that evolutionary ethics consisted of
resisting the violence of evolution; his grandson (see Huxley,
Julian S.) said that evolutionary ethics consisted of
embracing the cooperation that evolution produces. Russian
philosopher Petr Kropotkin derived evolutionary ethics from
mutualism in his 1902 book Mutual Aid.
Many scientists, including evolutionary scientists, are
religious (see essay, “Can an Evolutionary Scientist be Religious?”).
To these scientists, the empirical evolutionary basis
of ethics is not enough. They admit the evolutionary origin
of ethics, morality, altruism, and the behavior patterns of
religion. Their desire to believe in transcendental truths, they
admit, is beyond scientific proof or disproof.