Morality! Thorn in Darwin's side or not?

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You must be content thinking that you have come up with ‘case-closed’ evidence. Well watch as I turn that very evidence back in your face. Let me start by saying that evidence is a like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say anything you‘d like it to say. In the wording of Rev. Dr Francis H. Wade. Now one thing I hate is having to repeat myself after I have been so crystal clear the first time, but let me do it anyway just in case I give you the impression that you are winning.

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Tell me Cedre, are you by any chance 6 years old? If not, you are doing a fine impersonation of a child.

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If I go into an office and mindlessly take something off the desk put it in my pocket and walk out with it. Wouldn’t that still be committing theft?

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Good. You have conceded my point.If you steal something without making a concious decision to steal it, you still consider it theft. Therefore, you are now arguing that conscious choice is not necessary in moral decisions and that unconscious non-choices can still be moral or immoral.That is what I have been trying to tell you.

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So this would mean that an individual can also be altruistic unconsciously like the rabbits thus the rabbits are also being moral in that they are risking their lives for others even if they don’t know about it. No, because unlike the rabbits that have no choice but to exhibit this behavior humans have a choice to act morally or immorally, so morality is a conscious choice and not merely a conscious act it is also a choice. And I exhibit morality by returning the item to the office rather than just nipping it.

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Nonsense. if you were unaware of your act of theft, you had no choice about it. You can chose to make amends, sure, but you cannot undo the fact that you committed an immoral act without the conscious decision that you claimed was needed for morality. You have undermined your own argument.

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There is a TV show... {snip} ...an instinct operates on and by stimuli.

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If you want to say that instincts respond to stimuli, just say it. I don't need the tedious stage-hypnotism stuff, okay?All life forms respond to stimuli. Conscious decisions are made in response to stimuli. You have misunderstood what an instinct is. It is not simply a response to stimuli.

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An example of such instinctive responses to stimuli in nature is the fire ants of America.

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I know what an instinct is thank you and I do not need another tedious example which demonstrates nothing. Please restrict yourself to relevant examples.

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This is a good example of an instinct. To be sure you cannot equate this behavior with morality that exists in human circles.

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No and I neither wish to nor need to. Not all behaviours are linked to human morality. This one is not. Obviously.

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Let us suppose that they are being altruistic, so what God

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Whoops! There's that name again. Let me remind you one more time. No religion in the science threads! That is how we do things at EvC. Okay?

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But before we say that what the dogs were doing is an act of morality we have to ask were they acting out of love or out of instinct

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The whole point that I am trying to get through to you is that there is no difference. These are dogs that we're talking about here. They don't make conscious choices in the way that we do, yet they display altruistic behaviour. You are attempting to create a wholly arbitrary distinction between instinct and altruism that is not supported by the evidence. You even manage to contradict your own argument here and there.In human society, helping the wounded is seen as altruistic. There is no reason not to consider the same behaviour altruistic when it is displayed in dogs.

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How can you compare two things that are not the same

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WTF?

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as I have shown above you cannot compare morality with instinct that the rabbits obviously display.

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And I have already pointed out the glaring contradictions in this argument.

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How is this missing the point if I draw the line to what should be regard as stealing and what shouldn’t am I missing the point. We need boundaries in life otherwise we would end up in a huge mess and we don’t want that.

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You have missed the point again. you may need boundaries, reality does not, especially when they are arbitrary and artificial ones. You have decided that human-like reasoning is required for morality on the basis of absolutely no evidence and in direct contradiction to the evidence that has been presented. That is poor logic, poor science and it is even poor religion.

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Not necessarily because we may be doing something with a good intention and no selfish thought but we may reap by doing that good thing.

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Good. So when you argue that lion or hunting dogs have ulterior motives for their altruistic actions, it is irrelevant. Altruism mixed with selfishness can still be considered altruism.

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However the morality I’m discussing are those in which you wouldn’t necessarily gain, why else would we call them selfless acts.

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And I have already demonstrated that there is no such thing.

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But with the African pack dogs they may be helping the other which is the right thing to do but perhaps their reasons for doing so are selfish and as such are not genuine altruism. People may try to be good for a couple reasons for show, for other selfish reasons or simply out of love.

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And thus you contradict yourself again. You are willing to accept mixed motives in humans, but not in animals. You are once again, simply drawing your arbitrary line and dismissing anything below it.Further, do you really imagine that love is not an instinct? How quaint!

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First prove that we operate on instinct and then provide examples that are already happening in nature.

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Don't be absurd. The fact that we operate partly on instinct is well known. I see no more need to provide evidence for this than I need provide evidence that the sun rises. Nonetheless, try sticking your hand into a fire. Do you need to make a conscious decision to take it out again? Or do you simply take it out instinctively. Human instinct is a well researched field. I suggest that you do some reading yourself instead of trying to get me to do your homework for you. It is not baseless. if you had been paying attention, you would realise that I have provided several examples of increasingly sophisticated moral systems in animals and man. Do you really believe that the toddlers in the experiments I mentioned are operating through a learned system of behaviour? At eighteen months old?

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No ways morality has everything to do with God.

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Baseless. And off limits in a science thread. Stop dragging your religion into the science threads please. It does not belong here.

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No correction science doesn’t belong here.

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Or punctuation apparently...This is a science thread. Look up at the top of this screen; it says "EvC Forum - All Forums - Science Forums - Biological Evolution - Morality! Thorn in Darwin's side or not?". Get it? Science forum. Not god forum. I'm not. You said, in the OP; At least try and stick to your own topic. If you want to talk about religion and morality, propose a thread in one of the faith forums.

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The mother may be old and dying and the kids may still be young. The kids may even be a menace giving her grieve but no worries her goodness hasn’t been dampened by this.

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Not a single bit of which alters anything that I said. people have an in-built reward/punishment mechanism, namely our conscience. You are clutching at straws.

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All of this is useless for evolution; evolution is after survival not feelings

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The point of these inner rewards is to encourage behaviours (like group co-operation) that promote the survival of the group. That is why they evolved. Think about it; would a species whose mothers who had no instinct to look after her child survive as well as one that did?

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The entire research you are citing can be used just as well to supports the bible’s

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And let me stop you there again. NO BIBLE TALK! I will simply ignore (or possibly ridicule) any religious talk from here on in. It is not appropriate on a damn science thread.I note that you have ignored the study I cited, save to make unfounded claims that it is similar to your holy book. You have not addressed the point of the study; that there are demonstrable similarities between human moral behaviour and chimp moral behaviour. Why do you ignore this? Because it refutes your "argument". Very poor.

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You talk of mirror neurons, how does this prove that humans somehow copied being good from other humans? This is a speculation as far as true operational science is concerned. But note something funny as well, the research you have cited completely goes against the neuron idea because it proves that we have altruistic characters from birth and we do copy them as such.

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For fuck's sake... It doesn't prove that morality is a copied, learned behaviour. That is not my claim and if you were paying even the slightest bit of attention, you would know that. Show me where I claimed that morality is a learned behaviour, copied from others. You can't, because I never made any such claim. Do try to keep up.

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About neurons maryjean see this statement Wikipedia makes,

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SAMMYJean. Not maryjean. Pay attention Cedre! Also, failure to properly capitalise someone else's name is extremely rude.The text you highlight only serves to reinforce my argument; human morality is similar to animal morality, but not identical, which is what I've been trying to tell you from the start.Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Hey Dronester, Initially I was thinking yes. But as I think a bit more about it I would be inclined to believe that such a televised event would initially captivate audiences but after a while it may be viewed as too barbaric to continue, and may even spell the end of executions all together.In any case I think advertisers would be weery of investing, I don't know who would sponser such an event...maybe Energizer?Maybe the energizer bunny can roll by beating his drum as some person behind him is shaking to death on the electric chair, as you here: "Energizer batteries, they keep going and going and going..."Also, here's a paper on just such a case when Timothy McVeigh wanted his execution televised: Publicly televised executions

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Conclusion:

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Timothy McVeigh has not made a formal request to have his execution televised, but the convicted Oklahoma City bomber has questioned the fairness of limiting the number of witnesses to his execution.[57] Given the crime for which McVeigh was convicted, it seems logical to assume that his motives in wishing to have his execution televised are simply to undermine the legitimacy of the federal government by broadcasting a horrific act that the government sanctions. However, if the government sanctions such an act, then by definition (at least in this country), the people sanction it. Clearly, if the public wishes to continue to sanction executions, it is going to have to come to grips with the nature of the procedure. It is gruesome. Executions behind closed doors serve one legitimate purpose; that is protecting the privacy and the dignity of the condemned individual. For that reason, courts have rightly held that prisoners cannot be forced into public executions.

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However, for those individuals who wish to have a public execution, courts should not stand in their way. The public has a right to know the true nature of a procedure it sanctions. Moreover, public executions serve as a check on the prison officials conducting the execution. If the public is going to sanction an execution, it should be assured that the execution is being carried out in as humane a manner as possible given the situation. If the procedure is gruesome, so be it. If execution horror stories[58] are shown on television, then so be it. The public has a right to know what it is authorizing. Some people may find the procedure barbaric and may be moved to protest further executions. Some people may see the execution as a just and rightful end to a barbaric human being. Either way, if the condemned individual wishes to have his message broadcast, if the news media wishes to facilitate that broadcast, and if citizens choose to watch that broadcast, then they should be able to exercise that choice free from any unreasonable restrictions placed on them by the state.

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It does however note many reasons for public executions, but none seem to have an aggressive nature about them. It's almost like a scared straight program to keep would be offends from commiting further crimes. Like the Say No to Drugs campaign...but for serial killers.One point that isn't taken into account in the paper is the fact that lunatics would be more inclined to commit more henious acts just to get themselves on tv. They'll probably have a speech already prepared for their execution day, before they even get caught.- Oni

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"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

I think what Cedre might find more convincing is not more evidence of altruistic behavior among animals, but of an evolutionary origin for the behavior.--Percy

Cedre,
One of the problems that come with using Wikipedia is that it is often outdated or simply inaccurate. Mirror Neurons have indeed been discovered in humans!!!
Nature Reviews Neurology
Right there in black and white, and from a respectable scientific publication not wikipedia!
You started off this tread by making the claim that researchers are baffled by human altruism, which you have yet to prove to me. You also made the claim that Christianity has the answer to it, the whole we were made in gods image bull-crap! Yet you have provided no scientific evidence that shows we are made in gods image? There's not even any evidence that proves god exist let alone that he made us in his image!
I am a researcher in the biological sciences and work at a cutting edge Bio-tech company in California. If I believed as you believe I would have to just give up working on lifesaving research, because why do it? Who needs it? When all humanity really needs to do is pray to god and he will fix it all. Maybe we shouldn't be spending hard-to-come-by research dollars on finding cures for cancer or aids, we should spend that money hunting down Satan instead! Because it is Satan that's causing all the trouble in the first place, isn't it? or was it that cancers and other diseases are gods way of punishing us for disobeying him? (boy that god guy...what an altruist!) Either way we scientist are just foolishly wasting our time and money!!!....NOTEdited by SammyJean, : No reason given.Edited by SammyJean, : No reason given.

Fair enough, I will concede that certain societies are less aggressive than in the past.However, I don't think this can be strictly attributed to Darwinian evolution. Being sentient beings with well developed culture, we adapt much faster culturally than genetically. You said in your opening post: In the case of human society I think these traits are memetic rather than genetic (which I understand you didn't say they were one or the other). And since memes evolve more in a Lamarckian sense than a Darwinian, the thorn is no longer in Darwin's side.I guess my point is that using humans as examples for evolution, especially of complex social traits, is not a good way to go about it because we tend to evolve our culture much more readily than our genes.

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely

Dear SammyJean I followed your link and have analyzed its content.
Mirror neurons have indeed been found in the macaque monkey. However even your own cited research has not claimed to have found mirror neurons in Humans in the flesh, like the Wikipedia article have stated scientist who dare to presume the existence of such tissue in the human brain are no more than doing guesswork or suggesting in the words of the Wikipedia article. Here is what your Nature Clinical Practice Neurology article says:

A large number of studies based on noninvasive electrophysiological (e.g. EEG, magnetoencephalography [MEG]) or brain imaging (e.g. PET, functional MRI [fMRI]) techniques have demonstrated the existence of the mirror mechanism in humans.8, 9 Brain imaging studies have enabled the mirror areas to be located. These studies showed that the observation of transitive actions done by others results in an increase in blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal not only in visual areas, but also in the IPL and the ventral premotor cortex, as well as the caudal part of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). These latter three areas have motor properties and closely correspond to the areas that contain mirror neurons in the monkey (Figure 3)
Nature Reviews Neurology.

Did you simply decide to ignore this quote or perhaps it was genuine mistake? I don't know.For the plain reason that actual mirror neurons haven't been happened upon touched and studied in the human brain denotes that any number of other known or unknown properties of the human brain could be triggering this mirror neuron-like activity in this brain parts said to harbor the mirror neurons.Here is an interesting quote from slate in their article "Cells That Read Minds?What the myth of mirror neurons gets wrong about the human brain." Follow the above link to see the full-length article.Here's another mind-blowing statement from the same article I'll urge you SammyJean not to slander the largest internet encyclopedia just because it doesn't rhyme with you on a certain pointsEdited by Admin, : Fix quoting.

The passage mentions two techniques used to identify the areas in the brain where mirror mechanisms operate (noninvasive electrophysiological magnetoencepholography and brain imaging), and from this they infer that mirror neurons are there. You refer to this as guesswork. That's your rebuttal? No analysis or rationale for your conclusion, just denigration? You should have been on the OJ jury, Johnnie Cochran would have loved you. Well, that's some kind of chutzpah given that your approach! And I could turn this about and level the same accusation at you, and where would that get us? Let's keep our focus on the topic and not on the participants, okay?All science is tentative. There's no such thing as conclusive evidence. One common element in your approach so far is to just always require more evidence than already exists, in which case there's no point in discussion with you. It's not within the power of science to provide conclusive proof. But if you are interested in discussion and analysis of the information and evidence we have then there's a number of issues from other participants in the thread that you're ignoring.--Pecy

Percy let me reply you with a scenario. Suppose that my neighbors do not have electricity and at sunset instead get about the house by the aid of candles, so each time one of them pass by anyone of the windows all one gets to see are their shadows. Suppose also that my neighbors are extremely introversive and as such I never got a glimpse of them at any time, what they actually look like. Would it be wise of me to conclude that they are a black family, of six children, that the youngest child is named lulu and the oldest daughter is named Sarah, John has a scar on his right cheek because he is so fond of skirmishes.In fact I would be able to conclude all of these things because there is no end to my imagination. The only way I can be certain of who my neighbors actually are is to pay them a personal visit and to meet with them face to face. The two techniques used to infer mirror neurons in human brains (noninvasive electrophysiological magnetoencepholography and brain imaging)is not too different from what I have done with my neighbors .

Sorry, your analogy and the study results don't seem at all analogous to me. They correspond as poorly to each other as your squirrel and moth examples did to reality.But you're letting yourself get distracted by side issues. The strength of a position is not measured by one's ability to issue denigrating judgments, but by its ability to persuade others through its evidence and explanatory power. You seem to like to support your position with examples and analogies, which is fine, but they have to actually correspond to the real world if you've to have a chance of convincing anyone.There's a number of discussion choices open to you right now, just select from the criticisms of your arguments from the last few days and go from there.--Percy

Point for point break down why any one of my examples analogies whatever were horrible. I allow you to start with the latest one. Point for point bearing in mind that neurologist haven't directly tested the presence mirror neurons in human brains. While your at it also explain how these scientist have come to agree on the conclusions that they've agreed on based on almost nothing but inferences. When I read their conclusions, that language, autism morality the list goes on, that all these various things can be accounted for by the presence of something which hasn't actually been seen and felt in the brain. Now read what you say about my examples and tell me if this isn't denigration. Edited by Cedre, : No reason given.Edited by Cedre, : No reason given.

Hi, Cedre. I'd be glad to.Let's start with this one: Let me compare both your reclusive-neighbors analogy and SammyJean's mirror-neurons citation to a third example, a birdwatching analogy: This is why your analogy is flawed: you equated an example having imperfect evidence with an example having no evidence. Do you see the difference? Do you see why your reclusive-neighbors analogy is not analogous to the mirror-neurons example?Edited by Bluejay, : changed color for legibilityEdited by Bluejay, : Double-enter within "qs" box

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-Bluejay/Mantis/ThylacosmilusDarwin loves you.

Not so BlueJay, let me draw the parallels between my latest example and what scientists are doing with this whole mirror neuron thing.First of all scientist see some activity in parts of the human brain (the inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe) when a person sees another individual performing an action and also when the person him/herself performs an action, and based on this activity they (relevant folks) infer that we have mirror neurons in these parts and without even establishing this they even go so far as to give it one those fancy scientific names "mirror neuron system", Wow a system not having witnessed a single mirror neuron they resolve that we got a system.In my example I also see the shadows of my neighbors, and thus infer that people must live there just like the scientist when seeing this brain activity infer the mirror neurons are there, they should first establish that the action is caused but nerve cells/neurons and in fact this is the best they can do without seeing and testing the cells to determine what sort of nerve cells these are. But I end up inferring more than the data on hand will allow me just like the scientist have done. I conclude that they are a black family of six that the youngest child is named lulu and the oldest daughter is named Sarah, John has a scar on his right cheek because he is so fond of skirmishes. And so on. Now point out which part of my example doesn’t compare to what the neurologist are doing.Edited by Cedre, : No reason given.Edited by Cedre, : No reason given.

Hi Cedre,You're getting hung up on distractions. Do you want to talk about your topic or not? Because what you're doing is taking every opportunity to talk about other things.Unlike your characterization of the conclusions of the brain imaging and magnetoencephalography studies as "guesswork", the criticisms of your squirrel and moth examples were specific and detailed. You chose to ignore them. You can't now complain that a brief and unfavorable characterization of your examples by way of reference to the earlier criticisms is unsupported denigration.I suggest you go back and address the shortcomings. It's not like we were shy about pointing them out.--Pecy

Hi, Cedre. Here is the difference: neurologists have solid evidence that mirror neurons are involved in copying behaviors. Thus, when they see human brain activity associated with copying, they conclude that there are likely mirror neurons in the human brain.This is logical. It is a tentative conclusion, but it's a valid conclusion.The conclusions you drew from your example are completely off the wall. Shadows are not in any way correlated with names, ethnic groups or personalities, so there is no way make a logical leap from seeing shadows to concluding names or ethnicity.Edited by Bluejay, : The grammatical structure, "they seen brain activity" suggests to me that "they" in fact know very little about brain activity.

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-Bluejay/Mantis/ThylacosmilusDarwin loves you.

There are probably other cells as well that can account for this and other factors may also account for this activity. I also have solid evidence that people live there, just like the neurologist have solid evidence that this activity is neuron related, what both I and the scientist lack is what kind of people/neurons is causing the shadows/activity in the windows/brain. We are in the same boat and the conclusions they draw don't make sense because the conclusion they draw for the humans are not even observed in the very monkeys that the mirror neurons have actually been detected in and studied. Another thing there are several structures that have the same function in different organism but are actually not the same. they are analogous.