What is evolution's explanation of morality?

I like questions like this. At first, I just defied religion because I was against it but I then looked into the writings of scientists such as Richard Dawkins and he has provided me with fascinating knowledge that maybe you should study.

I believe in the theory of evolution. One thing you have to understand is that as Atheists and Scientists alike, we call our ideas 'theories'. We welcome and encourage change and we are always trying to prove our own ideas wrong so that we can progress. We don't just blindly follow ancient scriptures which were written in times when society was very different.

The idea is that in the beginning, we were simply bacteria-like beings, at the bottom of a theoretical mountain. If you stand at the bottom of a mountain, there is no way you could just jump straight to the top as Religion suggests we did through being created.

Its the same with evolution. For billions of years, species of animals have evolved. Some have just evolved faster and have climbed the mountain quicker. As humans we are at the top of the mountain now.

Now on to the Morality question:

When our family tree eventually formed into more ape style creatures, we began to form communities and create loving bonds. This was incredibly succesful and enabled us to hunt together and protect each other. It ended up being a tried and tested method that continued into the species of ape that formed humans. They formed the ability to make decisions which allowed them to progress, which in turn led them to live in shelter and form what we would know as villages etc.

If you look at chimpanzees now (one of the closest relatives to humans), you can see the fundamentals of a human-like morality structure. They are still far behind humans because they never evolved as far yet they love each other as families and stick together, hunt in packs and protect each other. They even have social hierachies, with the top member of the group being the one that provides the most to benefit the community overall. They even progress and learn and in the wild, Chimps are known to use stones as tools to open nut shells etc. Another amazing fact is that chimps who have learned to use tools will even 'lend' their tool to a fellow Chimp who is struggling to open a nut and will even break open a nut and hand it to another Chimp, or even humans. This shows not only the fundamentals of human kindness but also of community and the passion for helping others who aren't as fortunate. Helping everybody as a whole for the benefit of our species.

This natural ability to know right from wrong and to love and provide for fellow members of society can be seen in humans still and has always been there, handed down from the ancestral ape species that we evoloved from

Religion is not needed to teach us right from wrong, we naturally have that ability. In fact, teaching religion from a young age just prevents young people from exploring what life is outside of religion.

In a world WITHOUT Religion, good people would still do good things and bad people would still do bad things. Religion cannot prevent people with bad intentions doing bad things. The difference is, in a world WITH Religion, good people are driven to do bad things for their faith.

Morality is a natural part of being a human and it has been with us ever since our anscestors evolved millions of years ago. Our natural morality instinct to love each other, protect and provide for our community came millions of years before Religion.

I hope this provided you with some answers and can only hope that one day you choose a life outside of religion, to see the natural world for the incredible place it is and to realise that we are incredibly priviledged to be alive as humans and we should never waste that priviledge by basing our lives on preparing for death.

My first thought is, why do you believe that we have evolved beyond other animals? We are a very young species. So young by comparison to others on the earth that we have not demonstrated any superior ability to survive. Elephants exhibit moral behavior that may be superior to our own and species of elephants have been here much longer than we have. Intelligence, as a survival strategy, is relatively new and unproven. Technology, a consequence of that intelligence, may well contain the seeds of our own extinction. It's looking that way. If our weapons don't do it, our release of the carbon that's stored in the Earth will. Our time on the planet has been the blink of an eye. We haven't proven superior in any way yet except for an unprecedented ability to kill each other. Name another animal with that kind of morality. Wolves don't do it. Sharks don't do it. No animal does.

Great question. Thought provoking. Thanks for asking and listening.

The claim ignores what happens when organisms live socially. In fact, much about morals can be explained by evolution. Since humans are social animals and they benefit from interactions with others, natural selection should favor behavior that allows us to better get along with others.

Fairness and cooperation have value for dealing with people repeatedly (Nowak et al. 2000). The emotions involved with such justice could have evolved when humans lived in small groups (Sigmund et al. 2002). Optional participation can foil even anonymous exploitation and make cooperation advantageous in large groups (Hauert et al. 2002).

Kin selection can explain some altruistic behavior toward close relatives; because they share many of the same genes, helping them benefits the giver's genes, too. In societies, altruism benefits the giver because when others see someone acting altruistically, they are more likely to give to that person (Wedekind and Milinski 2000). In the long term, the generous person benefits from an improved reputation (Wedekind and Braithwaite 2002). Altruistic punishment (punishing another even at cost to yourself) allows cooperation to flourish even in groups of unrelated strangers; the abstract of Fehr and Gächter (2002) is worth quoting in full:

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfish motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.

Finally, evolution does not require that all traits be adaptive 100 percent of the time. The altruism that benefits oneself most of the time may contribute to life-risking behavior in some infrequent circumstances.

This claim is an argument from incredulity. Not knowing an explanation does not mean no explanation exists. And as noted above, much of the explanation is known already.

I'll try to answer your questions in order:

how is it that humans even consider right and wrong?

We are a social species, and have adapted to cooperate, since it promotes our survival. To survive in groups, it is necessary to minimize or eliminate conflict. Right is actually that which minimizes or deflects conflict or promotes empathy...wrong is that which promotes, initiates, exacerbates, or engages in conflict or divides us.

where does our morality come from?

From the need to live and work cooperatively. We are not solitary hunters and we survive best in groups. Animals that live in groups develop behaviors that promote relatively peaceful coexistence, and animals that hunt in groups develop behaviors that promote cooperation.

did we just make it up? is it even reliable? does it really matter?

Yes, of course we made it up. How would that make it unreliable? Our morals gear us to work and live together with a minimum of conflict. Of course that matters.

if we're just cells, why does it matter if it's right or wrong?

Who says we're just cells? Because we're not just cells...we're members of a group, and the only way to live safely and sanely in a group is to minimize or deflect conflict, promote positive interactions within the group, encourage cohesion, promote empathy, and establish personal boundaries.

how are we able to think beyond our physical needs?

Our adaptability - that probably evolved to help us deal with some pretty unreliable environmental factors like unstable climate and food resources - has encouraged the development of abstract thinking, which has enabled us to plan ahead, to more fully exploit the environmental resources available to us.

how was evolution able to bring us so much farther than other animals?

This question demonstrates a lack of understanding of evolution...there is no "goal" and we did not come farther in any way. We are only the best adapted to our niche in the world. We make terrible tigers and worse field mice, and we'd suck at filling their niches in the natural world. You need to stop thinking linearly. We aren't the "best" species or even the most advanced.

I'm wondering if you have ever considered the other alternative........ that maybe a someone or something beyond our understanding started the whole thing in motion.......is it possible?

First, evolution has nothing to say about how life began - that's abiogenesis. Second, there doesn't appear to be a need for outside agency to start things off, based on recent experiments and theories, although I don't have a lot of knowledge about abiogenesis, myself.

are you content with the explanations that make sense to you?

Why wouldn't I be? I don't understand what you mean by this.

do they satisfy? do they ever leave you wondering?

Everybody wonders...but I find the idea of some big grown-up running things to be unlikely, at best. There's certainly no evidence of one anywhere I've seen, and no apparent need for one in the processes we've observed.

feel free to address any or all of the above- I'm just interested in your thought process-

do you really believe what you believe or are you just against everything else?

I kind of found this part of your question kind of offensive...you are essentially asking me if I am a liar or just in some kind of pointless rebel. Considering that evolution is actually the mainstream of scientific thought, I could ask you the same thing - do you really believe in the myths or are you just against everything else? Acceptance of evolution is at 97% among scientists, so I'm hardly against the generally acknowledged facts by accepting the fact of evolution.

I hope that helps you understand.

It's fairly obvious that dangerous people destabilize the group they live in, so they are going to be selected against. In other words, they'll be killed or driven out, or cause the destruction of their group. The groups with strong protective members are the successful ones.

Isn't it obvious that mothers who don't care for their babies will lose them? That means that careless mothers won't pass on their genes and will die out, and careful mothers will have careful daughters and so on, surviving through the ages. Caring for others is highly valued in all societies as a consequence.

And morals are different in different societies. Inuit people used to share their wives with passing travelers. It increased the gene pool and was advantageous, and became a moral obligation. Not so in our societies, where it would have a destabilizing effect.

There is so much information available on this subject that no one need ever be left wondering.

Haven't we already been over this?

Moral instinct is a psychological trait that helps both the individual and the species as a whole survive and be successful, and so many types of creatures--exprcially the more complexed ones such as primates and other social mammals--have evolved some form of moral instinct.

It can be demonstrated mathematically, by means of rôle-play simulation exercises, that certain behaviour patterns within a pack of predatory animals are highly detrimental to the survival of the pack, and populations containing large numbers of individuals exhibiting those behaviour patterns will perish in short order.

Those behaviour patterns happen to be exactly the ones that we consider obnoxious; precisely because if we did not have some instinctive programming to avoid those behaviour patterns, we would already have died out.

It's as simple as that, really ..... what behaviour works is mathematically determined, as surely as 1 + 1 = 2. In humans, our instinctive programming rewards good behaviour with a release of endorphins (the body's natural pain relief / "feelgood" chemicals) and triggers the same "disgust" response to bad behaviour observed in others as the sight and smell of filth, dead bodies and similar unpleasant things.

Social survival.

We are social animals and social animals are encoded not to kill their own without reason, especially not members of their own immediate family or tribe. Why? Because you cannot have a stable social structure for long when every member is living under constant fear of being murdered by the others. The trade off made in a social structure is that you won't kill me, but in turn, I won't kill you either. It is an implied social contract so basic that even ants and fish understand it.

And we are not alone in this.

Look at any other social animal group. Packs of wolves don't murder each other willy-nilly. The only time they might is when a new alpha male is competing for pack leadership. But even when feeding, they don't kill one another to get more of the moose carcass, even though more food might be to their individual advantage to do so. The GREATER advantage is the maintenance of the social structure.

Piranha are the same way. Watch a good old fashioned piranha feeding frenzy and notice how, even in the frenzy, they don't murder one another.

Apes, meerkats, gazelles, horses, dolphins, tetras, dogs, lions, ants, penguins, hyenas, loaches, bees, etc, etc, etc. Across insects, birds, fish, and mammals, the natural instinct among social animals NOT to kill their own is deeply encoded in the genes.

And it goes beyond killing to theft, assault, and a number of other behaviors that can potentially disrupt the social stability of the overall group.

These are not the whole of human morality, but they are most definitely at the core of it. The rest of human morality comes from a continuous refinement of thousands and thousands of years of living in stable communities and studying (and applying) law, ethics, philosophy, science, politics, economics, and other social and intellectual sciences. Morals change constantly as we learn more about ourselves and our world. Always have.

(Even most of the moral laws in the world's holy texts can be shown to exist in legal codes either pre-dating that text or existing several continents away having never been influenced by that text. Why? Because the basis of those similar moral beliefs are internal to our kind, not externally handed down to us. Of course all the different tribes would come up with similar rules for behavior within their tribe.)

Even people who do believe in the Bible used it to morally justify slavery not 150 years ago. Now days, people claim that SAME book proves that slavery is immoral. Two hundred years before that people used the book to literally justify the burning and drowning of people accused to be witches as moral. Now, not only is it NOT moral to burn anyone for any reason, but pagan religions are protected as valid by law and the Bible crowd happily goes along with that.

Why?

Because the book is not an actual, stable, eternal basis for consistent moral belief. Morality changes on a social level and then we re-interpret the book to match (and then believers pretend that's what the book *really* said all along and that previous generations just misunderstood it).

There is NO evidence that morality comes from religious belief.

memetic evolution; that has to do with sociology, it's not biology.

Biological evolution does not comment on how morality came about.

Essentially, moral codes arose to keep civilization and society intact. Anyone that is threatens the function of civilization or harms others is deemed immoral and removed from society by imprisonment, execution, etc. As the structure of civilization or society changes, so will morality.

Evolution has nothing to do with morality. Morality has to do with cultural norms, standards that can change from culture to culture and era to era. It has nothing to do with biology, which is what evolution is concerned with. Abstract thought helped the human race to survive. What he did with his enhanced cognitive abilities beyond basic survival is secondary.