Subject: [SciPol 273] Morality in chimps?

From: "Dan Agin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 05:33:03 -0500

I've never seen a reason to assume a sharp neurological
disjunction between the hairy primates and the naked primates
(humans). I think we can assume, even if we don't have all the
missing links yet, a continuous evolution from the hairy primates
to the naked primates. But humans have indeed brought something
new into the "struggle for existence" -- their evolved brain has
given them articulate language, oral and written, and with
language they have been able to pass experience down through many
generations. The result is that each generation does not start anew,
but essentially begins on the shoulders of all previous
generations. The human ape is a "time-binding" animal, a concept
introduced sixty years ago by an insightful fellow named Alfred
Korzybski. Human time-binding is essentially the transmission of
what we call "culture". Culture evolves, Lamarckian rather than
Darwinian in its process, and with it our "morality" evolves. If,
for example, we want to explain changes in the past 100 years in
our "morality", I think we need to look to cultural evolution
rather than to biology -- which is why I've been so negative
about the quick and easy pronouncements of evolutionary
psychologists concerning the origins of human behavior. Anyway,
concerning empathy in hairy apes and what it means for empathy in
naked apes, I suggest we be careful and not jump to any
conclusions about the origins of our moralities and ethics. I
think after at least ten thousand years of transmitted culture,
they are mostly cultural in origin. The floorboards of the stage
may be biology, but the opera on that stage is culture.

Yours in discourse,

Dan Agin

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From: Lloyd Davidson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:32:55 -0700

Well stated.  I only wish that there was some sort of "survival of 
the fittest" force operating on those cultural mores that are passed 
on through the inheritance of acquired characteristics.   Or maybe 
there is, and the evolution of such cultural components is simply as 
directionless as biological evolution turns out to be.  Other good 
examples of such non-biological evolution in culture is in style 
changes and in art movements.  Not much that could be considered 
"progress" in either of these.  There was a program on NPR yesterday 
or Tuesday that I heard a few minutes of that suggested that the 
world's morality was showing some improvement because there was only 
one major case of genocide going on at the moment.  Some improvement.

Yes, evolutionary psychologists are producing theories without much 
hard evidence to back them up.  They are interesting but too 
speculative to be taken at all seriously - as yet.

Lloyd

-- 
Lloyd Davidson, Ph.D.