Life = Mutation = Intelligence = Morality (well... in time)

Great Debates
1

Submitted for your approval (or dismemberment :slight_smile: ) a counterpoint to this thread.

I have but a few givens:

Life

  1. Life - that survives the early bouts with the environment, with small errors occurring with each generation
  2. A slowly changing environment, with possible but rare cataclysms (ie. asteroid strike, significant volcanic activity, etc)

Now I am very certain I am not the first person to offer this premise, but if you can allow those two stipulations, I think morality would arise in some form over the passage of time.

Mutations
First, a life form would survive only if it reproduced somehow. To do so, it much survive to maturity. To survive it must be reasonably well suited to the environment. Weaker lifeforms will die off quicker and produce less (if any) offspring. Stronger and better adapted lifeforms will produce more. Most anyone born after 1950 has heard of this thesis, so I won’t belabor the point. I will, however, state that over time microevolution* would give rise to actual evolution - particularly in geographically separated populations. And on cosmological time scales.

Intelligence
Life can survive based on a variety of qualifiers. Strength, intelligence, and fertility are the ones that spring to mind. Only intelligence would eventually possibly have the means to stave off cataclysm through increasingly improved technology. Fertility will eventually overpopulate and reach an equilibrium point - if nothing additional were added they would be potentially eliminated by said cataclysm. As would strength (dinosaurs).

Rinse, lather, repeat. Asteroid, caldera, volcano… you get the idea. Each new round of evolution giving rise to one of the three (or another if you have one) until ultimately a lifeform arises that can at least survive beyond the near global event, or complete global event. OR it can prevent it by way of some asteroid detection program and an active process of preventing any life threatening asteroids from hitting the planet.

Morality (Cohesion)
So intelligence arises. The species that learns to operate in small societies will typically flourish. Numbers matter. Both as predator and as prey - herd or pack. To have a more stable society, ways to enforce cooperation would arise. Anger, vengeance, revenge, shame, guilt all come to mind in some version or another as examples that we can relate to.

Eventually, the group with the least inner-friction would have an advantage over a group with more infighting. A better allocation of resources, greater ability to work towards shared and mutually beneficial goals… I think this point is reasonably evident as well.

I am not so foolish as to think that a perfectly altruistic society can arise and be fine. It only works insofar as the other groups are not hostile. Even so, a cohesive fighting force will have advantages against a divided one.

Over time other means of engendering cooperation will arise. The original instinct to care for one’s young until maturity (a likely outgrowth of evolution) could be subverted to work for other blood relatives - and even non-blood relatives. Other means could also arise - compassion, empathy, affirmation, the afterglow of doing a good deed, self esteem, etc.

Assuming that groups can take even a reasonably close trajectory, there will be a tendency towards greater compassion, greater empathy, less oppression. The lines of acceptable and unacceptable will move and get renegotiated - up, down, up - with a trend towards up. Life likes to survive.

Wrap Up
Life is anti-entropy, it seems. It swims upstream. It writes epics, discovers fusion, loves, despairs, and posts inane OP’s with far too many words in an effort to make a fairly evident point.

Morality is, in some ways, the glue that holds a society together. Its shared values and mores create the cohesion, trust, and sense of justice needed to keep things working. It is in a population’s benefit to gradually increase in it’s moral distinctions**. And I’d submit that’s what’s happened. That last sentence… I’ll state as an educated opinion and I know others will argue with that point.

The rest of the post… where am I wrong?
(Not so) Fine Print
*I don’t want to use quotes on this as I think that would unnecessarily tweak. I think microevolution is intellectually dishonest if used to hand wave evolution away. Otherwise it’s an apt description of the smaller mutations that lead to the larger distinctions.

** This is why a sense of moral judgment or indignation will ever be important on some level - and why pure compassion would likely never work - it’s too blind and would eliminate the selection pressure for morality (cohesiveness).

2

While I muight have a go at nitpicking here and there (one obvious one is the assumption of a relatively stable environment), but in broad scope, the overall thesis seems reasonable to me, and agrees with my own stance.

3

No, this is basically the widely discredited group selection argument.

I’ve recommended it elsewhere, but The Origins of Virtue presents an excellent explanation of how co-operation evolves from a selfish,, Game Theory-centric perspective, and explores the different “moralities” in the animal kingdom. Basically, “tit-for-tat” is an optimum evolutionary strategy, better than “always cooperate” but far better than “never cooperate”.

4

I think I agree with the second paragraph, and did make note of your reading suggestion in the other thread. It sounds interesting enough (and CHEAP!).

I may be missing something but here’s my question: in the process of speciation do you not have some form of group (albeit isolated) before you have differing species?

I’d like to note that I don’t think always-cooperate is a good model or one that a population would evolve into as noted in my **. I do think that on some level there is a selection pressure towards improved methods of ensuring cooperation (where justified). As such, since I see cohesion/cooperation as the primary point of morality, I think in general morality would increase at a slow pace as the mechanisms and principles spread through a population.

5

[hijack]Ever read Moral Minds? It’s also available in paperback. I’d be curious what you thought, particularly as it pertains to this topic.[/hijack]

6

Yes, but its isolation is the key factor, not its “groupness”: an individual which could reproduce asexually could undergo the necessary genetic drift if isolated from its original population. Group selection fails because the posited groups still interbreed with the rest of the population and are thus vulnerable to “selfish” individuals. Matt Ridley’s key thesis is that creatures with memories can remember who screwed them last time, making screwing others a risky evolutionary strategy assuming the rewards for screwing versus cooperation lie within certain bounds.

And no, I haven’t read anything of Marc Hauser’s - is he good? I imagine he won’t be covering ground too different from Ridley.

7

I think I’m gonna call this thread dead except for the book club. :slight_smile:

I agree with your points. Perhaps I could or should have chosen the distinctions and words more carefully.

I’m wondering what I’ll get from your book as I feel like Moral Minds covered a lot of territory. It starts off with different scenarios - tested the world over - for how people treat situations. What if you HAD to do something and didn’t. What if you “should” not do something, but did. What if there was a particular person on a track and you COULD save them, but then…

From there he goes into disgust, revenge, honor (macho) cultures and the dynamics that seem to shape them (farmer vs rancher in the US), etc. It’s all rather interesting and telling. He, over the course of the book, lays the groundwork for us being what he calls Rawlsian creatures - as compared to Kant and such. It’s an interesting view on our intuitions and why they are what they are.

Oh! He tries to take a Chomsky approach to morality. Seeking out the “grammar” of morality. The settings we can have and how they are set by a culture… I rather liked it. I recommend it almost any time morality comes up as a major theme.