Morality is a Logical Consequence of Evolution, not Creation

Well, given that Hitler was a creationist and Stalin was a Lysenkoist, a Darwiniist could start by pointing out that they were both wrong about biology.

You can't really denigrate things like kindness, humility, and benevolence as logical consequences. Neither can you hatred and anger. These abstract entities transcend logic. Which switches our thinking into supernatural mode. We live in a natural world with something of the supernatural living within each of us.

I beg to differ. Human emotional responses all carry specific evolutionary advantages in a social species like ours. Even some of the urges that we look down on today (immediate rejection and suspicion of the unfamiliar, which leads to xenophobia, racism, etc) would have been beneficial when the survival of our species was still in question.We don't always feel an emotion for a logical reason, but that we have those emotions is perfectly rational and reasonable. Why should we assume that emotions imply the existence of the supernatural? Is that an acceptable response to any question you personally cannot immediately ascertain an answer to? Do you have any evidence that emotions are not the result of purely natural processes?When I feel love, or anger, or joy, or sadness, I don't see anything magical or supernatural. I see electrochemical reactions in my brain that are the inherited cumulative result of the same evolutionary processes that led to the rest of my brain's development. I see the end result as an emergent reaction in my awareness that, taken from a broader picture, helps hold society together and makes our species' existence as social animals possible. Our concern and caring for others in our social groups, our anger when we or those we care about are hurt, are all reactions that allow us to work together and thus share knowledge and experience and defend ourselves against predators and nature. Despite the aberrant mental short-circuits we see in te mentally ill or those who "snap," I see emotion as absolutely necessary for the "big picture" to work.You'll also note that other social species like dogs, dolphins, and non-human primates also share a capacity for emotion or the same reasons. Dolphins will protect members of the group from predators rather than working alone. Monkeys will groom each other, share food and water, and feel loss and sorrow when one of their number dies.I think the evolutionary origins for emotion as a purely natural phenomenon are quite obvious.

Hi Rahvin. Thanks for your response. I'm sorry, this reply was long overdue...work kept me very busy this week. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I can name a few human emotions that perhaps have nothing to do with the whole "survival of the fittest" idea. Peace is one. Guilt could be another possibility.... Awe. Boredom. Embarrassment. I'm arguing from logic, Rahvin. I have evidence, but that-- you would not accept since you don't believe in the supernatural. I understand the bolded to be the evolutionary definition of an emotion. Correct me if I'm wrong.So, according to you, emotion is an emergent property. And they're indispensable to survival (kinda?) Nothing abstract about them. Its all within genes and proteins, correct?So, they're chemical, inheritable, and advantageous in some form or shape to organisms that exhibit them. And you seem to stress their benefit to species or communities as a unit, as opposed to individual organisms.How is it that the same emotions you mention like anger, love, concern etc, cause intra-specific struggles? You say they are a benefit to the entire community of said species as a whole (necessary for the big picture). But we see that the same emotions are a evolutionary means of eliminating the "unfit" within species. How does your theory accommodate this? How can emotions be both beneficial and not-beneficial to a species survival? If more monkeys carried the "angry" gene, there would be lesser monkeys over time, but that also means they are better able to protect themselves from predators..which means more monkeys over time? They either are a benefit or a dis-benefit.

Hi Dr SingHope you don't mind me butting in on your discussion with Rahvin. You must always remember that "survival of the fittest" does not necessarily mean physically strong and aggressive. It means best adapted to survive in a particular environment.A desire for peace can obviously be a survival advantage. Any creature that is determined to fight all the time is likely to get injured or killed before very long.It is a bit harder to appreciate why awe may be an advantage for survival, but is it not really an extension of curiosity? If you walk over the crest of a hill and see a new landscape open up and are thrilled at the sight of it, you may very likely be filled with a desire to explore it. Humans have clearly been successful at doing so. Boredom? It seems pretty obvious to me that a dislike of being inactive is a survival advantage. Anyone who keeps themselves busy, fixing their home, socialising, generally being fit and active, etc, is likely to have an advantage. Guilt & Embarrassment? Realising that you've drawn socially critical attention to yourself must surely be a good thing. Someone who did something that upset people but had no negative feeling that made them avoid repeating that action would surely be at a social disadvantage.

Some things are hard to explain. That doesn't mean we should jump to supernatural.Why do my hands sweat when I'm nervous? How could that be an evolved benefit? How does it even do anything for me?Would you jump to a supernatural explanation for sweaty palms too?

No worries. I completely understand. "Survival of the fittest" isn't really descriptive of evolution, despite the popularity of its use. It's more like "survival of teh fit enough."But emotions don't have to provide a specific benefit for individual survival. Evolution is all about populations, not individuals. And populations of human beings survive much better when we are able to work together. In fact, it's our ability to work together and share abstract ideas that allows us to consider ourselves the top of the food chain, despite the fact that an unarmed and unassisted human is easy meat for a single tiger.Emotions help us function as social animals. Some of them involve obvious survival mechanisms (tribalism, the basic "Us vs Them" instinct) helps drive a population to better compete against rival populations for resources.But not all of them are obvious. Anything that helps us function better as a cohesive society provides an advantage because we are social animals. That includes emotions like guilt, or embarrassment. There's no reason to believe there is some mystical magical source of emotions - we know that they are nothing mroe than biological processes in our brains, and that other social animals (not all of which are even primates) display similar emotions. If you provide evidence that the supernatural exists, I will believe in it. I'm very simple in what I believe, Dr.: my credulity responds to logic and evidence. The more extraordinary the claim (ie, the more a claim departs from what I already know and my everyday experiences), the more extraordinary the evidence required to convince me that the claim might be accurate. I hold virtually nothing as certain, and consider everything with relative degrees of confidence. I cannot be absolutely certain, for isntance, that the Sun will rise tomorrow, but I am extremely confident that it will.Present your evidence. If it is actually evidence, and not bare assertion or a logical fallacy (as has been the case with every single other religious claim I've seen to date), I'll believe you. Not indispensible, but highly advantageous on the average and for the population as a whole.
But as with any selection advantage, today's advantage can become tomorrow's hindrance. Tribalism was fine when we were actually tribes competing for hunting grounds with spears. It's not so great now that we have nuclear weapons. The benefit or detriment of almost all traits is subjectively determined by the environment - and the environment can change. COmpeting with rival groups of humans wasn't a bad thing when our species was, say, first establishing agriculture. The benefits of taking over a rival's already-worked farmland and stealing his havest are just as obvious as the benefits of being wary of such an attack if you're the farmer. All of that tribalism serves as an advantage for the group.It doesn't have to be ethical. Frequently it's not. Evolution isn't an intelligent process; there is no more ethical concern to the spread of advantageous traits through more frequent reproduction than there is to the mechanisms of gravity, or the process of solar fusion. Throughout our history as a species, those instincts have helped us survive.But now, we have changed our environment. Resources are not nearly so scarce, and we've developed trade and transportation to ease the problems of limited resources. We've also developed methods of destruction far in excess of any other species that has ever lived on Earth. Now, tribalism threatens the cohesiveness of our diverse societies. Now, aggression towards "them" threatens nuclear annihilation. Again, whether any adaptation is a benefit or a disadvantage is dependant on the environment.Let's make an example. Some species (starfish, many reptiles, etc) have the capacity to completely regenerate lost limbs. That sounds great, right? Get your arm bitten/chopped/crushed off, and you grow it back! What an advantage!But it's not always. Yes, having two functional arms is better than one. But there is a [i]cost[i] to that ability. Just 1kg of muscle contains about 5,000 calories. Reptiles, starfish, and the like tend to have relatively slow metabolisms - they just eat extra food to process into the lost mass. But humans are significantly larger, and as mammals we have faster, more energy-intensive metabolisms to begin with. We would need to eat massive amounts of food to be able to support the regrowth of a limb. When you can survive on a cricket a day, it's not a big deal to eat two or three; and the lost limb likely didn't have much mass in the first place. When you need several kilograms of food every day just to survive, eating two to three times that amount is a much bigger deal - and we'd have to do it for longer, because our limbs are so much larger.Basically, a human being is just not likely to be able to keep up with the caloric requirements of limb regeneration. What serves as a great advantage for a lizard doesn't serve us very well at all.Whether a trait is positive or negative is very rarely so binary as "x is good, y is bad." This is especially so with social behavior, where the end result is dependent on the function of the whole.