"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.