(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World." Beginning with "Selfish Behavior of Primates and Other Animals," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Original Sin in the Bible as Read Today.")

The Evolution of Ethics

It is usually a bad idea to try to derive the content of human ethics explicitly from evolutionary theory—for example, by arguing that natural selection means that only the strongest or "best" among us should survive. Besides, many attempts to construct such systems of "evolutionary ethics" have mistakenly assumed that naked competition is the only rule of evolution. But competition of the crudest kind is merely the most basic, not the most refined, form of behavior through which natural selection can act. Until recently, biologists and ethicists were unaware that many kinds of cooperation occur along with competition in a wide range of species. Such cooperation should receive equal consideration in any system of evolutionary ethics.

Cooperation and competition together, by leading to social behavior, may even have made possible intelligence itself—and consequently ethics. Many biologists today think that primate and human intelligence, or at least important aspects of it, evolved in response to selective pressure for social sophistication that included cooperation, competition, and exploitation of others. In this view, our intelligence was molded less by the demands of physical survival, such as toolmaking and cooperative hunting, than by the psychological demands of social interaction and political gamesmanship.

Like all games, social and political life has rules, including those we call ethics. Because social living among primates is very ancient, it is probable that the overwhelming majority of human ethical principles (taboos against killing, stealing, deceit, and the like, at least within one's own social group) have deep evolutionary roots, whether they are handed down through our genes or through our learned social customs. Such ethical principles (and even more subtle ones) can be seen at work in many nonhuman animals today: reconciliation, consolation, succor, and even high-level "diplomacy" and peacemaking between leaders of warring groups are behaviors we would consider desirable, ethical, or virtuous in a human context (just as we would consider many of these same animals' selfish behaviors sinful in a human context). This should not be surprising, since ethics of some sort, including what de Waal (1996) calls community concern, are essential to the functioning of any society, animal or human. The Golden Rule, in the form of reciprocal altruism, is familiar to many of our fellow creatures.

Indeed, it would not even be surprising if some animals (like some humans) occasionally performed altruistic acts in the absence of any tangible payoff. Sympathy for one's associates had to start somewhere. For it to have evolved, some payoff must once have been present, but the actor need not have been conscious of or consciously motivated by it. Consciously, there may have been only the satisfaction of helping another—a feeling from which our species has abstracted a moral principle, and then, by free will, internalized it as a duty. This would explain how genetic selfishness could become compatible with genuine altruism on the part of the conscious individual. Such a blurring of category boundaries—gradation between the "pure" extremes of selfishness and altruism yielding intermediate states in which matters and motives are decidedly mixed—is what one naturally expects to see in the course of evolution.