Posted on 05/06/2004 7:48:05 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Seebach [the interviewer]: In the first part of the book you talk about the development of morality within other species and then in the human species.
Shermer [the author being interviewed]: I start off with a naturalistic approach to the origins of morality as if we were talking about the origins of any characteristic in humans. You have the immediate historical cultural origins, then we have a deeper level - "Where did that come from?"
There has to be an "original origin," and for that we need evolutionary theory. So I turn to the higher primates as a way of looking at where the pre-moral sentiments might have come from. When I say moral sentiments I mean emotions, things like feeling of justice and injustice, fairness and unfairness, pride and joy, humiliation and embarrassment. Those are the kinds of things that we think of as having some influence over our moral actions. You see all those things in gorillas and chimps and rhesus monkeys, and there's actually a nice body of literature on this, of social cooperation and interaction tasks that psychologists put these primates through. And when they get cheated, they feel cheated. You could see it. They don't cooperate in the next round, they get angry, they throw their food.
It's not anthropomorphizing. They feel cheated, they feel a sense of injustice. Now they don't have a language in which they can identify and call it something or even think about it in any rational way that we know of, but the feeling, "I was just cheated and I'm unhappy about that," we have those same deep-seated emotions.
Seebach: At one point you talk about morality as being a property of the species.
Shermer: The reason I wrote that chapter was to answer the believers' claim that without God, without an outside source, there's no transcendence to morality. They ask, are you saying that it's just purely a cultural thing? And my answer is no. There is a source of transcendence and it's evolution; these deep-seated moral sentiments were given to us as members of the species by evolution. As a member of the species you get that, it comes with the territory. And so it's not just a function of our immediate culture.
I consider myself a spiritual person, and I have an awe of nature, a sense of transcendence when I see an eclipse or a Hubble space telescope photograph. These things all generate a sense of transcendence, spirituality, every bit as warm and fuzzy and religious as when I was a religious person. You know I was an evangelical Christian for years and to me Chartres Cathedral is wonderful but so is Machu Picchu or going up to Mount Wilson Observatory and sitting in the chair where Edwin Hubble himself sat and discovered that our galaxy is not the only galaxy.
Seebach: When I express sentiments similar to yours I often hear from people who think that I must be miserable and unhappy, or I must be an evil person. I'm sure you hear the same things.
Shermer: It's simply not true, empirically. There is research on this, not a lot but some, that religious people are not actually more moral in any kind of quantifiable way than nonreligious people. Rates of infidelity and almost anything you want to measure, Christians are not any better than anybody else.
Seebach: Is this peculiar to America?
Shermer: You do find similar data in Europe. It's a great interesting mystery why we are the single most religious nation in the Western industrial world and yet we're also the most scientific. There is something of a logic-tight compartment in the mind of the American where we separate these things.
Seebach: But is it really the case that we are the most scientific when something like 40-odd percent of the population believes in some form of creationism?
Shermer: Yes, really we're the most technological. But most people have no problems with most scientific theories; you picked evolution because that is the one. It's not just evolution of cockroaches that bothers people, it's human evolution. And it's not just any aspect of human evolution; after all, most people will say, OK, I can kind of understand, I can look at a chimpanzee and it's obvious - we're apes. However, they want something more, something like "We have souls." I have found the subject of ethics and morality is really what bothers people more than anything else. Without God, what is the foundation for society? For us living in this social group?
Why should people be good?
So I address that head on, one-on-one. What would you do if there were no God, I ask the believer. Would you all of a sudden become an immoral person, would you start stealing and lying a lot, cheat on your spouse, would you cheat on your business partner? No, no I wouldn't do that. Why not? Well, because it's not right to do.
So in other words I think religion does provide something of a moral policeman in people's heads. It's true but it's a very shallow, superficial form of morality. I think we could do much better than that by recognizing that there are moral principles that are sound and that stand alone regardless of what religion you are. And even if you're not religious at all these are still good moral principles we should abide by.
Seebach: How does religion come to take on the role of conveying that it's the source of morality?
Shermer: About 5,000 to 7,000 years ago there was a gradual transition from humans living in small bands and tribes of a few dozen to a few hundred people to larger chiefdoms and states of thousands and tens of thousands of people. When that transition is made there's too much anonymity in these large populations for all the previous informal methods of behavior control to operate.
One reason I don't want to cheat on my business partner or my spouse is because in a small community everybody will know and it will be embarrassing, I'll be shamed and humiliated, my reputation will be hurt, and that feels bad. If you live in a huge anonymous society of 100,000 people or a million people, who cares? No one will know, they don't even know who I am.
So when that transition happened something needed to be done to codify these rules, to say these aren't informal, these are formal rules, we're going to write them down and everybody's going to get a copy. So the Code of Hammurabi, or the Ten Commandments, whatever it is, you need that, you absolutely need that, for larger communities, communities that have more than just my family, my extended family and community of friends that I know.
Religions were just the first on the scene to do that. It's why they have principles about truth telling. They harp so much on sex because infidelities are quite common and they're very destructive to relationships, marriages, society and so on. What I am arguing in this book is that religions are admitting, they are confessing, there is a genetic predisposition for a lot of these immoral behaviors, it's part of human nature and we have to ride herd on it.
Seebach: Infidelity is quite common among chimpanzees.
Shermer: There are a lot of interesting parallels between the chimps and bonobos and humans. I argue in the book that we are more like bonobos for within-group relationships. We're very sexual, as bonobos are, we're relatively peaceful within groups compared with chimpanzees, but between groups we're more like chimpanzees. We are really nasty, we have a very harsh tribalism that comes very naturally to us, dividing up into an in-group and out-group. Members of the out-group are definitely treated differently than members of the in-group and I argue that this actually makes sense from the evolutionary perspective if you think of evolution operating on the group either instead of on the individual, or in addition.
Then you have the tendency of cooperating within the group to take care of each other, while competing between groups for limited resources. So that helps explain some of the paradoxical nature of the Old Testament, that on one page it's talking about the value of property and truth-telling and fidelity and so on. On the next page the Israelites are told to rape, pillage and destroy those bastards on the other side of the river because they're not members of our group.
I think the reason for that is that it's tribalism, that is, in-group/out- group thinking. That is how we evolved, that's the natural way things are, and one of the reasons for political states and morality is to try to override that natural inclination.
Seebach: How do you see this playing out over the next several decades? Any hope?
Shermer: Mmmm - any hope? I have hope over the long run. I think in the short run there's much cause to be pessimistic. Take any particular decade in the last century, and you can pick out plenty of bad things, but if you look at the last 1,000 years you see the expansion of liberties and rights for more and more people in more places. The long-term trend is that that's the way we're going. The ultimate solution is that everybody is a member of our in-group, the entire species. We're a long way from that, but a long way is maybe 1,000 years, maybe between 1,000 and 10,000 years. I'm optimistic on that scale.
[Intro note:] Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and host of the Skeptics Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including In Darwin's Shadow (Oxford, 2002), about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace.
The Science of Good and Evil is part of a trilogy of which the first two books were Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe.
Sadly, some people
look dorky in whatever
clothes they choose to wear . . .
Ditto. Deep Field photos, particularly the ones which reveal all those thouasands of distant galaxies, just overwhelm me.
Why must it be specific to humans?
During the evolution of cooperation, it may have become worthwhile for individuals to compare their own payoffs to those of others, in an effort to increase relative fitness. Humans do so, frequently rejecting payoffs that are perceived as unfair (even if they are advantageous). While there is some variation, this response is widespread across human populations. If a sense of fairness did evolve to promote cooperation, some nonhuman animals may exhibit inequity aversion as well. This is particularly likely in social species with tolerant societies, such that individuals may reasonably expect some equity between themselves and other group members. Here we examine the response of five female capuchin monkeys to an unequal distribution of rewards during experimental exchange with a human experimenter. Females in pairs alternated exchanges with the experimenter under four conditions: 1) both females received the same reward, 2) one female received a superior reward, 3) one female received a superior reward without exchange (i.e. no work), and 4) a single female observed a superior reward in the absence of a partner. Females were significantly less likely to complete an exchange when their partner received a higher-value food item than they, and this response was amplified if the partner received the reward without working for it. Refusals to exchange included passive rejections, such as refusing to either return the token or accept the reward, as well as active rejections, such as throwing the token or the reward out of the testing area. Whereas the basis of this response is unknown (e.g. social emotions, as proposed for humans), negative responses to this type of situation support a relatively early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion.- "Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay", Nature 425: 297-299.
This straw man is old and moldy, and has been answered hundreds of times already. You just show yourself a close-minded fanatic by bringing it up.
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