Evolution, Darwin, and Morality - Is there such a thing?
"Assurances that we have nothing to fear from Darwinism are a familiar species of evolutionary apologetics. We're told that Darwinian thinking doesn't threaten morality, religion, or belief in life's having an ultimate meaning. On the contrary, it enhances all things good and fair. Karl Giberson's recent column in the Huffington Post, "How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth," deserves to be pinned under glass and put up on a wall as a near-perfect specimen of the genre.
Anyone who's honest with himself knows this is all propaganda and wishful thinking, but it refreshes us nevertheless to hear Darwinists themselves confess -- even trumpet -- the truth.
Darwinian scholars and journalists have been writing with what must seem, to their brethren, an alarming frankness. One occasion for the flurry of articles is the recent sensational book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, who present the picture of our evolutionary human ancestors as enjoying polyamory as their standard reproductive practice. Group sex was the rule for them, so there's no reason to expect marital fidelity from us, their heirs.
On the Scientific American website, psychologist Jesse Bering throws out the whole structure of sexual right and wrong with one blog post:
There are of course many important caveats, but the basic logic is that, because human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out "extra-pair copulatory partners" -- having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one's mindless genes -- then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.Dr. Bering concedes with some feeling that in evolutionary psychological terms, empathy for the jilted sexual partner also plays a role. But in general:Right is irrelevant. There is only what works and what doesn't work, within context, in biologically adaptive terms...." (More)
Labels: Darwinian Evolution, Ethics, Naturalism, Sexuality, Truth, Worldview
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