I agree on the importance of morality, but I have no idea why the author is using the subject to attack evolutionary biology.
The role of morality in our success as a species is probably better handled by other branches of science.
The notion that evolution undermines any objective morality is widespread in academic circles. Darwin taught this in The Descent of Man, and many contemporary evolutionists agree. Last summer I attended a conference on The Evolution of Morality and the Morality of Evolution at Oxford University. One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Michael Ruse, one of the most prominent philosophers of science today. He famously wrote in a 1985 article co-authored with E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology: Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate. Ruse has reaffirmed this position many times since then.If we were built by a process which did not have us in mind but is merely tuned for survival, then, like it or not, there must be a Darwinian explanation for our thoughts and behavior. Put another way, one cannot claim that Darwinism made our brains but has no bearing on the brain's contents.At that Oxford conference I presented a paper about the history of evolutionary ethics, showing that many evolutionists from Darwin to the present have rejected objective morality in favor of evolutionary ethics. Indeed I became interested in studying the history of evolutionary ethics when I was working on my dissertation in the early 1990s on the reception of Darwinism by German socialists. While researching this theme, I noticed that many Darwinists, both scientists and other scholars, wanted to replace Christian ethics with some kind of evolutionary ethics. Some hoped to construct a whole system of morality on evolutionary theory. Others dismissed this as misguided. However, mostincluding Darwin himselftried to explain the origins of morality through evolutionary processes.
Also, while I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the early 1990s, two prominent Christian intellectuals came to the university and gave talks about apologetics. They both argued that objective morality exists and provides strong evidence for the existence of God. During the question and answer session after their presentations, secularists in the audience challenged their claim that objective morality exists. The primary argument of the secularists was that morality had evolved through natural selection, so it did not have a theistic origin.
Richard Weikart
See also Evolutionary Ethics