Thoughts in a Haystack

Historically, moral and political policies have been based either upon mythologies of the supernatural or else mythologies involving nature. The belief in the special creation of species, in God's providential care for the world and everyone and everything in it, and in compensation for unjust suffering and retaliation for unpunished wickedness in the next life, are examples of moral supernaturalism that tend to promote ethical complacency and resignation where social inequality is concerned. On the naturalistic side, fanciful cosmological models of higher and lower powers and empirically false assumptions about the distribution of rationality and competence have served to rationalize oppression, maintaining the position of the parasitic classes of society—aristocrats, landowners, and priests—and not only allowing but also encouraging persecutory impulses. The new human sciences, predicated on the assumption that not only our bodies but also our minds and feelings as well are the products of a long evolutionary history, can potentially help us to frame a more accurate image of reality than folklore, philosophy, or the imaginations of novelists and dramatists. For as worthwhile as these cultural forms are, they are not sources of moral knowledge uncolored by bias and unwarranted assumptions.

... [H]uman beings have no functions, no purposes, in virtue of which their qualities can be evaluated, except those they themselves decide to adopt. A person is, from the biologist's perspective, a temporary federation of replicators that are working to be represented in future generations, sometimes threatened, sometimes exploited, and sometimes assisted by other federations of replicators. We exist not to glorify God, nor to exercise rationality, nor to bring about any particular conditions of society, but merely because we are assemblages of successful replicators.

Reproduction is the habitual practice of every organism; it is not the specialization of females, but of every living creature, and sooner or later, after the completion of this task, the individual dies. Furthermore, everyone now living is the descendant of ancestors whose qualities enabled them to survive and reproduce under demanding conditions—outfacing plagues, famines, natural disasters, and all the exigencies of social life and social conflict. In this respect, we are all biologically equal. Virtually all of us will have no descendants at all after some large number of generations have lived and died. In this respect, too, we are all biologically equal.

-Catherine Wilson, "Darwinian Morality," Evolution: Education and Outreach