Reason
"Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning that the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we may wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time, and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand each other very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains." Wilson: Consilience--The Unity of Knowledge.
The crude struggle for existence draws into play those resources the body and properties of the mind that help one to overcome the other competitors and rivals in the race for survival. The emphasis of this struggle would therefore be on the strength of brain and muscle, on endurance and courage, on cleverness and wit, on strategy and cunning, on deceit and trickery, planning and plotting, falsehood and sham, or on violence and aggression, to achieve the dominating position in the battle.  These are the traits that we continually see at work in the animal kingdom everywhere, on land, in the ocean or the air. But the moral virtues that have been highly regarded since the dawn of civilization and are admired even today are the very opposite of these traits.
Innocence has a greater appeal to the heart than cleverness, frankness than duplicity, truth than falsehood, simplicity than sophistication, humility than pride, honesty than deception, self denial than indulgence, pacifism than aggression, calmness than violence, artlessness than deceit and trickery and so on.
Some of these virtues are in direct opposition to the essential qualifications needed for the ruthless battle for self existence. But we really have no knowledge of the factors that have brought about this change in the instinctive armour necessary for survival. The theologian ascribes the emergence of morals to divine commandments transmitted through Revelation. Scholars ascribe their growth to mundane causes-for instance, the demands of civilization-but without convincing evidence. Biologists, on the other hand, are beginning to investigate the obvious inference that for any kind of moral behaviour which militates against the demands of the struggle for existence that involve changes in the depth of the human psyche, there must be consequent advantageous changes in those intricate mechanisms of the cerebrospinal system that give rise to it.   Although the evolutionary pathway is not clear, the appearance of moral behaviour must have been associated with behavioural traits associated with increased social cohesion in human social organisations.
On this view, culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups. However, culture and human social behaviour is complexly variable, but not because the human mind is a social product, a blank slate, or an externally programmed general- purpose computer, lacking a richly defined evolved structure. Instead, human culture and social behaviour is richly variable because it is generated by an incredibly intricate, contingent set of functional programmes that use and process information from the world, including information that is provided both intentionally and unintentionally by other human beings.  At the heart of social cohesion is the operation of transcendental thinking.