Evolutionary Basis for Ethics and Morals :: Science

growingary Basis for Ethics and MoralsWith the advent of Darwins theories of evolution and the ascent popularity of biological science as the explanation of human origins, it is perhaps no surprise that philosophers began to tackle the notion of ethics and morals from an evolutionary perspective, eschewing reliance on religious texts and yet seeking to find in science the basis for such char traveleristics that have long been under the purview of religion and used to crystalize humanity from its fellow animals. While sociobiologists studied the evolution of interrelations between organisms in pairs, groups, herds, colonies, and nations, both Thomas Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to derive the origins of such groups and nations and the foundation of their morality by using an biological evolutionary model (Dennett 483).Hobbes and Nietzsche tell stories of their own making to explain how such moral civilizations were brought into being. In the Hobbesian version, humans once existed in an amoral aver in which there was no concept of good and evil simply good and bad, with all ethics removed. For example, although they distinguished a good spear from a bad spear...they had no concept of a good or bad person, a moral person, or a good act, a moral act or their contraries, villains and vices ( Dennett 454). Mankind persisted in this state of nature...nasty, brutish and short, Hobbes believed, until several enterprising members of the population arrived at the notion of a social contract. Instead of remaining in constant competition with each other, humans began to band together outside of simple insular family groups for the protection and sustenance of all the state, in its nascent form.Dennett draws financial aid to Lynn Margulis story of the eukaryotic revolution, which does provide a useful basis for comparison between the evolution of human civilization and the evolution of species (Dennet 454). Throughout the Precambrian period, Ernst Mayr writ es in What Evolution Is, the rich diversity of protists gave rise to multicellular descendant, some of which then led to plants, fungi, and animals, and indeed the change from simple prokaryotes to the more complex eukaryotes, and from single-celled eukaryotes to multicellular eukaryotes, seems to reverberate human development into ethical beings assuming that Hobbes story is true (Mayr 60). The multicellular organisms, which, thanks to a division of labor among a gang of specialist cells, could right off pursue a more complex and