Thursday, December 11, 2008

Is tribal morality an evolutionary selection parameter?

A question on morality :

"It is hard to say anything is wrong in an evolutionary sense, since either it will work and the species will flourish, or it won't and the species will die out. For social animals the situation becomes more complicated as the evolutionary unit seems to be the herd, pack, or in the case of humans, tribe, village, or parish. From an evolutionary standpoint that which enhances the survivability of the tribe, becomes good, or if you will, evolutionarily favorable.

Morality, that is compliance with the rules and customs of social interaction of the tribe becomes simply another evolutionary selection parameter. Tribes with functional morals survive, those with dysfunctional morals die out.

The main advantage of God is that Hesh conserves (ossifies) moral systems that helped the particular tribe flourish under a certain set of conditions. As long as conditions don't change much and the tribe flourishes under those conditions, one can say that God based morality is an evolutionary advantage.

I can't think of conditions that would favor a child torturing tribe, but under conditions that favor properly nurtured and highly educated adults, if the torturers had to compete for resources with tribes that didn't torture their children I predict they would lose out in a few generations.

It seems to me that such an evolutionary situation is playing out right now in the treatment of women in society. Some tribes are systematically removing half their population from the knowledge based competition for intellectual property. (Some tribes seem to be eliminating their entire population from this competition, but that is a different issue.) It will be interesting to see whether these tribes are able to compete in the cosmopolitan world that seems to be the evolutionary niche humans are beginning to occupy.

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