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To: Physicist
You were talking about mutations, which has to do with genetics. Now you're talking about thought, which has to do with neurology. They are two completely separate mechanisms, but you've managed to conflate the two, somehow.

Your criticism is specious because the distinction that exists between neurology and genetics is not relevant to the discussion.

Let's simplify this by going back to a basic question.

Is morality anything more than evolutionary advantage?

106 posted on 12/12/2005 10:45:33 AM PST by Pete
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To: Pete
Your criticism is specious because the distinction that exists between neurology and genetics is not relevant to the discussion.

You specifically said random mutation. Thoughts are manifestly not random, and not the product of mutation. Human morality is a product of human thought and cultural development, irrespective of whether or not humans evolved, and irrespective of whether that evolution resulted from random mutation plus selection.

Is morality anything more than evolutionary advantage?

Of course! It's like any other product of the human intellect, like a song, or a play, or a screwdriver, or a gun, or a model made from Play-Doh. These things serve human purposes, which may or may not pertain to human survival.

As it turns out, moral systems do help us to survive, but they clearly have other purposes besides.

120 posted on 12/12/2005 10:59:34 AM PST by Physicist
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To: Pete
Is morality anything more than evolutionary advantage?

I can think of several instances where morality is to the detriment of evolutionary advantage. I've already mentioned one man, one woman. Then there's Christ, obviously a great man, a leader, someone who is extremely valuable to society, but he could have lived and reproduced had he not done the moral thing of trying to save everyone. Is becoming a priest moral? That definitely hurts reproduction. A man in WWII harbors Jews from the Nazis, an extremely moral act, and is executed for it. The immoral act of initially reporting the Jews would have allowed his genes to carry on, but the moral act stopped them cold.

I could come up with countless more situations where morality hurts your chance to reproduce and therefore pass on those beneficial "morality genes."

139 posted on 12/12/2005 11:23:49 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
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