"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.
