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worth repeating |
| David Sloan Wilson delivered a
Charter Lecture March 2 looking at religion with the insights of evolutionary
biology. Some excerpts: “The main purpose of my talk is to show you that the concept of society as an organism is a legitimate scientific hypothesis in evolutionary biology, and how we can use this theory not only to explain the nature of bodies and epochs, but also to explain the nature of human social groups, including religious groups. . . . “And so we can think of the traits we associate with moral systems as adaptations which have evolved biologically and culturally to suppress within-group selection. . . . At least it allows the group to function as an adaptive unit. “And this is important because throughout the history of evolution, ever since Darwin, morality and evolution have seemed to occupy opposite corners of a given box. It seemed that evolution did a fabulous job of explaining what was selfish, but that morality has to be explained in some other way. “But what this [argument] shows is that morality is at the heart of the evolutionary story of becoming human. If we’re going to tell a story about human evolution, then morality is going to have to make its appearance very early on to explain why it is that human groups were able to function this way and to become as cooperative as they did. . . .” |
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—Beth Roberts |