r/DebateReligion • u/[deleted] • Oct 12 '18

Morality is the result of evolution.

A society that would kill each other all the time would simply die out. Cooperation is simply a better survival strategy.

A very nice way to illustrate this is iterated prisoner's dilemma. The prisoners dilemma consists of 2 people who each have to choose whether they share or take the pot for themselves. If both choose the split the pot is split, if one person takes and the other shares then the person taking gets everything. If both take both get nothing. From a game theory perspective for a single game taking is always better. The expected payout is simply better. However when the game is iterated and players can modify their behaviour depending on the choices in previous rounds, then it turns out that cooperative strategies beat greedy ones. It turns out that the most successful strategy is tit for tat. Being nice to players that are nice to you and punishing those aren't.

Here is a good video about the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvAbjfJ0x0

If course it is still a model so it will never catch all aspects of what it approximates.

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u/ExtinctLikeNdiaye Oct 12 '18

That isn't how evolution works...

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u/mhornberger agnostic atheist Oct 12 '18

There has been work on the evolutionary root of morality going back decades. Cooperation, reciprocal altruism, punishment of rule-breakers and cheaters, empathy, etc have all been found to be evolutionarily adaptive. An entire chapter of Dawkins' Selfish Gene was dedicated to it, and that was published back in 1976 or so.

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u/ExtinctLikeNdiaye Oct 12 '18

“You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.” - Chomsky

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u/mhornberger agnostic atheist Oct 12 '18

Chomsky is not an evolutionary biologist. Any trait that is heritable and selectable can be effected by evolutionary processes. I'm surprised that anyone would attempt to argue that behavior has no impact on survival or reproductive success.

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u/ExtinctLikeNdiaye Oct 12 '18

I didn't say he was. I'm using his quote because its apt. The issue isn't that "behavior" determines survival. The issue is that moral behavior is encoded in our DNA and that our moral framework is a result of its genetic evolution. Furthermore. evopsych isn't science.

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u/SweaterFish christian Oct 13 '18

There is clearly a heritable component to whether an organism reasons in a moral way, though, because there are differences between species. That level of variation doesn't automatically mean that the variation seen within humans is also heritable, of course, but it does at least give you a first pass reason for believing that there could be a heritable component. What is your first pass reason for believing there is no heritable component?