Quote:
Originally Posted by sleepy jack
I understand that but I'm more curious of moral issues that have nothing to do with the survival of your genes. This is the problem I've always had with Ayn Rand, it's the idea of an "objective morality" that comes down to shag, eat, and most importantly ensure your race to survive. To me, that isn't morality so much as common sense...I tend to think of morality as being something a bit more widespread then that. For instance, the issue of gay marriage, now I would personally consider it immoral to deny rights and pleasures to others, but some people, based on a religious text, considering the very act of homosexuality immoral. How does that fit into your argument? From the stand point I've heard, and this may sound prickish, there seems to be an inherent contradiction there. On one hand you don't want to see someone of your species suffer an injustice because of some sense of empathy on the other hand wouldn't you want to discourage sexual behavior that doesn't lead to reproduction? This is kind of a bad example because it's not an issue totally separate from it but I'm tired. I guess we could get into taxation but I'm growing tired of debating the "morality" of that.
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This biology morale is not so good for producing a set of rules to live by. In my opinion, what it does is explain is why we have morals to begin with - where they come from - and it does explain some of the things we do, as my brief example on why we get jealous. It deals with a sort of caveman intuitivity, but now the caveman might live in a flat in NY and we need something a bit more elaborate. For me, it's more a way to help explaining where morals come from rather than something to live by. As a biologist, I expect a lot of deviants from a normal moralistic behaviour to be the result of mutations. Just like mental illnesses may have a genetic component, so may murdering others. However, as I wrote in my first post, what I follow are variations of the golden rule - not biology morale. However, if someone says something that is a complete contradiction of biology morale, I tend to say "wait a minute ..." and argue against that.
Homosexual behaviour is perfectly normal in nature and I wrote a lengthy post about that in the *** sex and religion thread, page 2. Homophilia - individuals that are exclusively going for same sex partners - is more rare because they produce less offspring and the more same-sexy they are, the more they are selected against in evolution. There shouldn't be a gene that if turned on or off determines *** or not, it would have disappeared a long time ago. Rather, I believe we are all somewhere between homo and heterosexual and the norm is to be oriented somewhere towards hetero, say 80% hetero and 20% homosexual. Many other mammals know how to live out the *** side, but we don't anymore because we have a need to define ourselves as one or the other, something a giraffe wouldn't concern itself with. Just like you get statistical outsiders that are very short or very tall, you also get people who are 70% *** and 30% hetero. Maybe they define themselves as *** people. That's roughly my own hypothesis, but it seems to make the most sense from what I've seen. There are identical twins where one is *** and the other not, so it can't be up to genes alone. I don't know if exclusively *** animals may cause problems for other animals, say a *** wolf in a wolf pack, but so far I don't think they do and I don't think we should discriminate.
I've never read Ayn Rand, but in reality, we don't care for our species. At least not in a care-that's-hardcoded-into-us way like we might care for our children. We only care for those of our species that we can benefit from. Altruism, if it exists at all, should be little more than a genetic anomaly and would be selected against in nature. The reason is because at the basis, we're selfish and altruism is exploitable by selfish individuals.
A popular example in evolutionary biology that can be used to explain my previous statement is this : Let's say you have a species of birds that consists of only two types of individuals - doves and hawks. When a hawk meets other hawks and doves, they fight the other bird for resources. If a hawk fights a dove, the dove shyes away before it is hurt. If a hawk fights a hawk, they fight until seriously injured, perhaps fatally, or until dead. If a dove meets a dove, nobody gets hurt, but they spend some time threatening eachother. The birds don't know prior to a fight what kind the other bird is and they have no memory of the bird they fought after the fight is over.
From this, we can make a sort of prisoner's dilemma with different outcomes. Since they are competing for resources, we can award the different outcomes different points to illustrate what they lose or gain from outcomes :
- Win : 50 points (for winning)
- Lose : 0 points (for losing)
- Injured : -100 points (hawk losing to hawk)
- contest : -10 (for meeting doves)
An individual that scores many points is an individual that tends to leave behind many genes in the gene pool.
If a dove meets a dove, they will spend some energy on a stare down and they will both gain -10 points. However, one will win and gain 50 for a total of 40. Let's say that on average, they win every other stare-down contest. Then you can say that the average pay-off for doves in a population consisting of doves only is +15 - the middle ground between -10 and 40. So the average score for every individual in the population so far is +15 ..
What happens when a hawk appears? The hawk will win every fight and so it's average score will be 50 - all win. It will leave lots of genes behind because it's strategy is so successful, but then his offspring will also grow up as hawks . Maybe the strategy is so successful that all doves are killed and we now have a population consisting only of hawks. As before, if a hawk in a population of hawks win every other fight, the average gain for every hawk is -25, halfway between -100 and 50. So you see, a hawk in a population of hawks every individual does worse than in a population where you only have doves. If you then reintroduce a dove to the hawk population, the dove should do better than the hawks again because it doesn't pay the cost of being severly damaged in fights.
So you see neither a dove population or a hawk population is expected to arise from this - they are not evolutionary stable. If everyone was doves, that would give the highest gain for everyone, but that social strategy is susceptible to being exploited by hawks (a hawk could appear through gene mutations and evolution). In the same way that hawks may exploit a population of doves, altruism is exploited in nature by selfish individuals and the population you end up with probably has both the equivalent of hawks and doves. So the population you end up with does not have the optimal strategy point-wise, which is all doves. Instead of hawks and doves, you can say you have a population of birds that always groom eachothers feathers (doves). A selfish bird that never grooms back would thrive in such a population - everyone would groom him and he doesn't have to spend any energy grooming others - so again the altruistic grooming behaviour is exploited by the selfish bird who's genes will spread.
The hawk-dove scenario is extremely simplified here and it can be elaborated on. Biologists like to set up lots of variables like kinship and explain them with math, but suffice to say that this is for illustrative purposes just to show how altruism can be exploited. In many populations, animals have adapted to remembering eachother and also with figuring out the would-be exploiters before they are exploited and so on, so you don't come across pure dove-hawk scenarios in nature. You can have societies and social rules where exploiters are excluded that push the population towards the optimal.
Gods damn, this is a long post now .. sorry. I can't blame anyone for not reading my wall of text. :p