Do Philosophers ever take Evolution into account?

Philosophy
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You’re welcome. Possibly, but it would be an interesting topic of conversation. I’m not interested in defending or debunking it. I’m just interested in it for the sake of learning about it.

I’m not so sure about these two statements, as a lifelong vegetarian. It’s not the cultural norm to be vegetarian or vegan, but it is a moral/ethical stance. I’m not even sure what cultural morals have to do with reproductive fitness even. What do cultural morals have to do with reproductive fitness? Sure, being monogamous decreases the chance of STDs, but medical science supports that. Science also supports the idea that vegetarianism and even veganism could help with fighting Climate Change. Science itself could help with establishing morality as new information comes and even changes. But cultural morals and norms increasing reproductive fitness? I’m not so sure about that. What if the cultural norms and morals were polyamorous and not monogamous and STD was a thing prevented with condoms and pregnancy with birth control and if either occurred one was treated with meds or whatever the woman decided if she became pregnant? Is the poly culture right or is the mono culture right concerning relationships? What about sequential monogamy? Is it a bad thing? Or going deeper down the rabbit hole, should the culture decide if one can be homosexual, bisexual, or not? Is it really the culture/society who decides for the individual what their sexual orientation is? What if one loves someone whose skin colour is different? Do we keep or repeal Loving v Virginia, because society/culture views humans with varying skin colours as “races”, instead of there being on race- the human race, even though two people with different skin colours can produce another human being? The two are perfectly fit for reproduction, regardless of the skin differences. Who actually decides morality/ethics- society or the individual? I’m not so sure cultural, which could be the society one lives in, can or should decide the morality or ethics for the individual. Then again, like vegetarianism/veganism, the LGBTQ community and interracial couples are outliers when it comes to “cultural morals and norms”. Either that or the decisions individuals make concerning morals/ethics and norms have nothing to do with culture/society, but rather themselves.

I propose that evolution doesn’t always take place at the reproductive level, though that is part of society evolving, but rather evolution also takes place when society evolves it’s thinking concerning individuals and they are treated concerning their individual ways of living their life too. A society, IMO, doesn’t function well if there is genocide, racism, sexism, bigotry, and in general, forcing people to think and act in the same manner as everyone else. A society functions better, even evolves for the better, when it is open-minded enough to allow people to live their life as they see fit, making their own decisions and choices, be it concerning religion or no religion, marriage, a way of life, dietary habits, sexual orientation, gender, medical decisions, etc. What we are seeing among the far right, in the U.S., is de-evolutionary thinking, but for those of us who are more open-minded there is the potential for evolved ways of thinking.

Do you see where I’m going with this? IMO, it is also very philosophical thinking too, to think evolution doesn’t just take place on the reproductive level.

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Would you mind expanding on that?

I think I understand “moral sense being the products of evolutionary processes” insofar as we humans were begat from mammals who give live birth, suckling, rearing, coherent family units and such that created their own boundaries and rules, which were passed on and evolved into morals, once people learned to put labels on notions.

That make sense? Or?

Are you over simplifying a bit? It’s not just creatures and more creatures, it’s creatures within a dynamic ecosystem, that can turn winner into losers overnight, while the meek inherit the Earth and then diversify as environmental conditions allow.

What does that mean?
I mean some species produce a baby or two a litter, others produce a dozen, or a hundred or thousands and more. That rate is fine tuned by all sorts of ecological and evolutionary (natural selection) factors.

Can you explain what kind of excuse that is? Is moral foundations all there is?
What about the morals of mammals? Do you think such a thing exists?

Sort of sounds like what we are doing to our Earth’s biosphere and climate engine. So where have our “morals” gotten us?

Although, on the other hand:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no parasite fan, just say’n :thinking:

Markus,
What fun catching up on this thread. Your comments have been fascinating and I too would love to hear more from you. Such as explaining the difference between moral naturalism and ethical naturalism, or are they the same?

Moral naturalism refers to any version of moral realism that is consistent with this general philosophical naturalism. Moral realism is the view that there are objective, mind-independent moral facts. For the moral naturalist, then, there are objective moral facts, these facts are facts concerning natural things, and we know about them using empirical methods.

1.1 What is Moral Naturalism?

We have said that moral naturalism is a conjunction of three claims:

Moral Realism: There are objective, mind-independent moral facts.

Metaphysical Naturalism: Moral facts are natural facts.

Epistemic Naturalism: We know moral claims are true in the same way that we know about claims in the natural sciences.

But moral naturalism is sometimes associated with a fourth, linguistic claim, about the nature of moral language. That claim is:

Analytic Naturalism: Our moral claims are synonymous with certain (highly complex) claims in the natural sciences.

Of these four claims, Metaphysical Naturalism is often taken to be the claim that is most central to the doctrine of moral naturalism. The debate between naturalists and non-naturalists is typically taken to be a debate about the nature of moral properties. Are those properties naturalor non-natural?—this seems to be a straightforward metaphysical question.

Philosophy makes my head spin. Heck describe a clear cut moral value? Thou shalt not kill? Yet there are all sort of circumstances where apparently it is moral to kill under certain circumstances. So where’s that leave us. Thou shalt not lie? Never?

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I don’t think that except for a very few species, animals in the wild have a sense of moral obligation.
Most animals have respect for their physical equals. But again that is an evolved survival expression of “don’t mess with another’s kill”.

Except the Honeybadger… :scream:

What is the most fearless animal?

Image result
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Honey badgers

The Scoop. The honey badger has been called the world’s most fearless animal because it doesn’t hesitate to attack animals much larger than itself- even lions and crocodiles! Honey badgers are found in arid grasslands and savannahs and even rainforests. They live in burrows in the ground.
(Wild Republic)

Reproduction is not caused by natural selection. It is caused by individual selection of a mate.
Natural selection selects for better adaption to the environment and longevity, giving the survivor a higher chance of procreation.

I totally agree. You have seen me identify humans as invasive species, the opposite of symbiosis. Where humans walk nature begins to die.

We are the most immoral creature on earth, because we know the difference and we still persist in destroying our environment.

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Hi citizenschallengev4

Expanding a bit on:

“Cultural moral norms and our moral sense are the products of evolutionary processes”

Science of the last 50 years or so supports:

  1. The biology underlying our moral sense has been selected for by the reproductive fitness benefits of the cooperation it motivates.

  2. Cultural moral norms exist because they motivate parts of cooperation strategies. People select, advocate, and enforce these norms based on whatever benefits of cooperation produced that people find attractive.

Since both the biology underlying our moral sense and cultural moral norms can evolve based on variation, selection, and replication, they are, respectively, the products of biological evolution and cultural evolution.

Both our moral norms and moral sense have a single primary selection force, the benefits of the cooperation they enable.

This seems to me worth a fresh topic rather going on in this Do Philosophers ever take Evolution into account? thread.

I’ll see if I can compose one.

1 Like
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mriana

Cultural evolution is an active field and the evolution of moral norms is a subset of that field. Cultural evolution, as you say, may have nothing to do with people’s reproductive fitness. Evolutionary processes regarding cultural norms only refers to variation, selection, and reproduction of the norms themselves, not of the people selecting for the norms.

Vegetarianism as an individual ethical choice is not a moral norm, it is just an ethical choice.

But if you were in a group of vegetarians (perhaps Hindus?) then you could decide that people who violate the vegetarian norm deserved punishment at least of social disapproval, then it would be a moral norm. If you ate a cow, they might even decide your immorality was so great that your punishment should be death.

So vegetarianism can simultaneously be both a simple ethical choice and a moral norm (a food taboo) whose violators deserve punishment.

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That sounds paradoxical to me. What would be the objection to eating (killing) a cow or any other form of life that would deserve a punishment equal to the offense?

Nature itself is absolutely neutral in regard to life and death. 95% of all organisms that ever lived are dead and have been killed or consumed by other living organisms.

As Hellstrom posited ; “Life must take life, in the interest of life itself”

Lest we forget that natural selection selects for those best adapted to survive while the rest dies along with their genes.

Death is inevitable in a circular renewal process. Death itself is not a moral issue.
Intentionally causing the death of your neighbor and taking his property is a moral issue (witness Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine).

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Of course, it go outside the norm in many countries.

It can also be a way of life or at least part of a way of life.

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What is true for food is true for many other things. And religion is often behind.

Some social norms are necessary just to let a society exists. For instance, the prohibition of killing another human being.

It can be a personal, ethical choice, but it is also a social norm. If every one was entitled to kill any one, for any reason, the society would explodes very fast.

Science teaches us that homo sapiens evolutionary advantage was his capacity for abstract thought and from that for building ideologies, nationalism, religion and so, and from there to cooperate in large numbers.

Sapiens the book from Harari has been heavily and justly criticized, but the facts are right.

For the philosopher, there is matter to think, including about the negative effects.

[Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Wikipedia]

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My first reaction to this is, how can a species evolve without reproduction? Nature can’t select something that isn’t reproducing. Okay, except some simple bacteria.

Sexual reproduction in eukaryotic cells is what developed the entire animal kingdom, isn’t it? That evolutionary breakthrough allowed for combinations of DNA with each new generation.

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Possibly, but not always.

I don’t disagree, but there are social norms that change when thinking evolves, such as with interracial and same sex marriage.

When it comes to ideologies, it could be a de-evolution. Religion is often taking us backwards, as does nationalism. Such thinking causes a de-evolution.

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write4u

The cow example was based on news reports from India of people being killed because of rumors that they had eaten a cow. The killers felt they were morally justified (according to the news reports) because the crime was so great.

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Morgan, I read that WIKI with much interest since over the years I’ve listen to the complete book at least twice and various sections another time or two. I think it’s a fascinating book (not that I didn’t find myself occasionally arguing with the author), so was very curious about the criticism.

The WIKI review didn’t impressed since the book seemed to me written for the lay audience and not a scholarly effort.

Scholarly reception

Anthropologist Christopher Robert Hallpike reviewed the book and did not find any “serious contribution to knowledge”. Hallpike suggested that “…whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously”. He considered it an infotainment publishing event offering a “wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny.”[22]

Science journalist Charles C. Mann concluded in The Wall Street Journal, “There’s a whiff of dorm-room bull sessions about the author’s stimulating but often unsourced assertions.”[23]

Reviewing the book in The Washington Post, evolutionary anthropologist Avi Tuschman points out problems stemming from the contradiction between Harari’s “freethinking scientific mind” and his “fuzzier worldview hobbled by political correctness”, but nonetheless wrote that “Harari’s book is important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.”[24]

Reviewing the book in The Guardian, philosopher Galen Strawson concluded that, among several other problems, “Much of Sapiens is extremely interesting, and it is often well expressed. As one reads on, however, the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism”. He specifically mentions how the author ignores happiness studies, that his claims of the “opening of a gap between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences” is silly and deplores how the author, once again, transforms Adam Smith into the apostle of greed.[25]

I find this Adam Smith remark is ironic. I do appreciate Smith is way deeper than most appreciate - still in the real world his name and work has been used to suppose “Greed Is Good” elevating it as the only value our economy should recognize. Fiduciary Response that requires ignoring hidden costs and consequences and externalities - which has lead to our current free fall that most still seem incapable of recognizing.

John Sexton, then a graduate student in the Committee on Social Thought from the University of Chicago,[26] concluded that “The book is fundamentally unserious and undeserving of the wide acclaim and attention it has been receiving”.[27]

Sexton the esteemed author of Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game – 2013

A love letter to America’s most beloved sport and an exploration of the deeper dimensions it reveals

For more than a decade, New York University President John Sexton has used baseball to illustrate the elements of a spiritual life in a wildly popular course at NYU. Using some of the great works of baseball fiction as well as the actual game’s fantastic moments, its legendary characters, and its routine rituals—from the long-sought triumph of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, to the heroic achievements of players like the saintly Christy Mathewson and the sinful Ty Cobb, to the loving intimacy of a game of catch between a father and son—Sexton teaches that through the game we can touch the spiritual dimension of life.

Morgan can you point me to sources that spell out their specific critiques.

Since, being a book written for a curious informed public, I think it’s unfair to expect it to achieve scholarly standards, after all the author must, by definition, round off nuances if he’s to connect with a fickled “public”.
Serious “bull sessions” are fascinating and it’s where learning and breakthroughs often start, so that detraction falls flat.

So I’d love to hear specific flaws, since that collection up there doesn’t inform and doesn’t rise about vague opining.

==============

WIKI
Harari’s work situates its account of human history within a framework: he sees the natural sciences as setting the limits of possibility for human activity and sees the social sciences as shaping what happens within those bounds. The academic discipline of history is the account of cultural change.

Harari surveys the history of humankind in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on Homo sapiens. He divides the history of Sapiens into four major parts:[3]

  1. The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BCE, when imagination evolved in Sapiens).
  2. The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE, the development of agriculture).
  3. The unification of humankind (c. 34 CE, the gradual consolidation of human political organizations towards one global empire).
  4. The Scientific Revolution (c. 1543 CE, the emergence of objective science).
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I Understand your argument, but IMO, Evolution is not the same as Natural selection.

Evolution is a stochastic mutational process. Millions of small mutational changes over an entire population, most of which are detrimental to adaption to the environment, some of which offer just the slightest survival advantage, but long enough to breed and add that slight genetic advantage to the general gene pool. Over long periods of time the gene pool gets enriched (refined) and that becomes the evolutionary process. But Natural selection does not select for sexual prowess, it selects for survival skills.

There is one sexual aspect to this in the form of aesthetic appeal that may add to attractiveness and prowess of males, making them more desirable to females who also select for apparent survival qualities in males. This may become expressed in ritual behavior that show off the male’s physical prowess (survival skills).

One drawback to this is that increased visibility and extraordinary behaviors also attract the attention of predators.

Of course the master of disguise to avoid notice of predators are shelless mollusks , like the cuttlefish or squid who are completely exposed (like humans) without any body armor, but have evolved camouflage strategies that make them invisible to both predators and prey.

They are the true living shapeshifter of scifi stories.
If that is not a superior evolutionary strategy , I don’t know what is.

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Actually once again, turns out it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Although this video is seven years old, I think you’ll find it somewhat mind-blowing, in a good way.

Specific to your remark would be the 13th minute of Nick Lane’s presentation, although all of it is worth hearing and trying to digest.

Sep 2, 2015

The vital question: Earth teems with life but why is it the way it is, and how did it begin in the first place? Nick Lane unravels the tangled history of life.

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But in a changing environment, over time, isn’t that’s natural selection for better adaptation to the new conditions? Or?

Seems to me “Evolution” is simply a term we give to the overall process, (great chunks of which we still don’t understand), “Natural Selection” seems simply the term we use for the different processes that create this change over time.

And I myself am shocked and disappointed at how often Earth’s constantly changing environmental doesn’t even enter this type of discussion. biological process are never random events, they are constrained by physics and biology - but Earth’s complex system is full of random bad luck, that totally rearranges, or only partially rearranges the conditions life must cope with (locally, regionally, globally) - regardless of creature fitness.

From pediaa:
The main difference between natural selection and evolution is that natural selection is the differential survival and/or reproductive success among the individuals within a species whereas evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of a population over successive generations.

khanacademy:

Term Meaning
Evolution The process by which modern organisms have descended from ancient organisms over time
Natural selection Evolutionary mechanism in which individuals that are better suited to their environment survive and reproduce most successfully

(Oh wow, that’s a cool coding trick to learn)

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Absolutely. What may have been a disadvantage, may well become an advantage when the environment changes and vice versa.
That is the stochastic nature of the entire process of evolution via natural selection. And explains the enormous variety of adaptations.

Then to think that 95% of species that have existed are no longer around. But about 5% of their descendents are still around.

“Everything is connected to everything else”

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That a product of simple math isn’t it, at first it wows, but . . .

After all, if that panorama of evolution is stretched out over a 24 hour day (or, 24x60x60 = 86,400 seconds) Civilized human have been around for about the last second. (or 0.0001157407%)

(Here’s a very nice presentation of different time periods in relation to us,

Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them. It’s not our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it.
If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second. And if human history itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since Christ. …

Indeed. :v:t2:

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Given this ridiculously short time for life, this increases the wow when looking at the difference between viable and failed living organisms.
It proves that the earth’s conditions are not fine tuned for life, but that extant life is fine tuned to the earth’s conditions.

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I’m sorry - the “fine tuned universe” or “not fine tuned” is meaningless argument.

It’s a stellar example of this Intellectual Entertain that so irritates me.
It posits nothing meaningful and offers nothing that can be tested, it’s a fun little head game without a resolution, and totally beside the point in any event.

Was another way of saying it’s a meaningless number. Besides, I’d be surprised if it’s that high, others suggest 99.9.
Being impressed by that number is simply a gauge of how superficially one understands the full scope of Earth’s pageant of evolution.

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I agree. It is life that is fine tuned to the eath’s local conditions, via “natural selection” of traits that give a survival advantage.

That just depends on your ability to imagine.
Anyway, who are you talking about, that you can judge without prejudice?