Darwin and morality

[parallaxicality]

I've been reading the comments of a creationist who's making the old connection between Darwin, Nietzsche and Hitler. It left me thinking, is there any way to counter a moral attack on evolution when evolution, by its nature, is amoral (it has no intrinsic morality one way or the other)?

I should say right off the bat that I'm an agnostic moral relativist; I believe that morality is culturally constructed and that, while we may have a bodily predisposition towards repulsion and acceptance of certain behaviours, our surroundings determine what those behaviours might be. I don't hold much with the Dawkinsian "genetic morality" idea, especially when genetic studies have reportedly confirmed that the single greatest contributor to the current gene-pool was Ghengis Khan. If the most effective way to ensure the passage of your genes to the next generation is to rape as many women as possible, that doesn't speak volumes for a genetic foundation for morality.

So is there a moral construct we could forge out of Darwin? I know from a scientific point of view it's irrellevant, since the proof of evolution is in observation and inference, not superior morality, but it would help in dealing with people who want to see the world in moral terms if we could construct an alternative that was acceptable to them.

[BenderBendingRodriguez]

What people "invent" along with evolution, like your discussion-partner thinks, is totally irrelevant when it comes to evolution itself. Just dismiss his comments as irrelevant, because they are.

[parallaxicality]

But they're not. That's the problem. That kind of thinking is part of the popular conception of Darwinism. Everyone thinks Darwin coined the term "survival of the fittest", but he didn't; a social-Darwinist proto-Nazi named Herbert Spencer did. I would like to find a way to separate Darwinian ideas from the social-Darwinian outgrowths that have poisoned it's image over the years, especially after the Holocaust.

[Disinfo Agent]

I mentioned Herbert Spencer as the founder of social darwinism a while ago in these forums, but I've done some reading, and it seems that Ernst Haeckel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haeckel) is also a good contender to that title.

Of course, there were plenty of people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism#Theorists_and_sources_of_Social_D arwinism) in the late 19th and early 20th century (and later...) who felt that biological evolution justified their own morality, or lack thereof. We can't deny that the theory and the fact of evolution have inspired some unsavory ideas. And some of them are not as blatant as Nazism, by the way, which only makes them more insidious.

For myself, I think all those moral philosophies based on biology -- because that's what they are -- are founded on a fallacy. The age-old notion that "What is" equals "What ought to be".

It doesn't. Some things in the world we cannot change, but some we can. It's precisely in those areas where we may be able to change what is (with more or less difficulty) into what we think ought to be that morality counts.

Let me give an example: vaccines. By inventing and using vaccines, we've been defying the laws of evolution. But no one cares, because most of us feel that there are higher moral imperatives than not interfering with natural laws. And rightly so.

[worzel]

I don't hold much with the Dawkinsian "genetic morality" idea, especially when genetic studies have reportedly confirmed that the single greatest contributor to the current gene-pool was Ghengis Khan.

You could make a similar argument about morality requiring something more than physics. To me that sounds like pleading for the supernatural, which is what you friend is doing, of course. But why should a rational skeptic be so against the idea that all human traits are ultimately reducible to physics, or genetics?

Dawkins never advocates giving up on morality and resigning ourselves to genetic determinism. In fact, in the closing of "The Selfish Gene" he says something to the effect that we are unque in that we have broken from the tyranny of the selfish gene.

[Glom]

How is ID more moral? God could have done it for a laugh. It is only human arrogance that would interpret the motives of a trascendent being.

Referring to his Christmas jingle, whose incessent popularity has made it tiresome.
HOMER: I've begun to hate my own creation. Now I know how God feels.

[JohnD]

P'ality,
Evolution is irrelevant to morality.
There are many examples of both fidelity and promiscuity among animals. The criterion is, which is more succesful in using the gene for that behaviour, as a succesful strategy for survival.

BUT, becoming the single male entitled to have the females of your community bear your children is no guarantee that your genes will persist. It will tend towards a limited gene pool, with consequent lack of success in the race.
Evolution protects against this - look at lions. The pride leader is the father of all the cubs, but when he falls, the next leader kills all the cubs that he can catch. Or deer - the stag collects a harem of females with which he mates, at extraordinary cost in growing antlers and defending his harem. Although they don't kill the fawns, alpha stags don't last long and another gets their chance.
Humans have replaced, largely, these countervailing pressures against a single father for the community by social pressures. Violence against women is rape, harems are too costly except for the monarch or mega-rich, who are too few to matter in the evolutionary race.

So there is an argument that this extraordin social animal, man, has developed morality and religion as an evolutionary strategy for success. See: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18925361.100.html

And maybe in one sense being agnostic is a way to fail to preserve your own genes?

John