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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (42146)	9/24/2013 11:15:17 PM
From: GPS Info	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

For some time now I have stopped teaching or recommending any philosophy. Ayn Rand was a great mind and forced many people to question the basic premises of moral values and personal responsibility versus social contracts and that idea of duty. I respect that intellectual effort. I feel that all philosophies must be reviewed and probably reconstructed to include recent insights of evolutionary biology. I am still digesting the ideas of a couple of videos and essays on this subject. My fundamental issues about morality and duty derive from initial tribal ethics which have/had adaptive value and how those values evolved as societies became more complex as humans transitioned into cities and nations, and then into a collection of nations under a United Nation's charter. Obviously, religions had a strong affect on that social evolution. In another E.O. Wilson book, the Social Conquest of Earth, he uses the term eusocial for the evolutionary process of creating a coordinated cooperation within a species and shows how this provides a significant adaptive value. I suspect that our human instinct to cooperate gives rise to the idea of morality and also to duty. Love is an interesting beast and I have been thinking about oxytocin, which is called the "love molecule". Theoretically, I could artificially increase or decrease the level of oxytocin or remove the genetic code that produces oxytocin so that a person never feels love or even a concern for other people. io9.com I would not want to construct a moral value system based on some arbitrary level of a molecule, but I would want to know how this molecule creates a cohesive family or community or a pair bond. There is no mysticism or romanticism here, just pharmacology. More broadly, I would not want to construct a moral code based on brain diseases or injuries. We are given moral codes by world's religions and some teach that we have a duty to obey. I once believe these were forms of mind control that sometimes worked but often did not. I see Christianity as trying to provide an ethical foundation to enhance the cooperation of different groups. I also see biblical lessons of sociobiology in that without an ethical foundation we fall back into a primitive mind set of personal gain and selfishness. I suspect that the intent of the Bible was to provide a eusocial moral framework to allow the merging of different societies. I'm less than half done with this idea, but I'm too tired to continue. I look forward to more exchanges.