incest, prevention or avoidance (obvious evolutionary moral trait)
in-group, biases in favor of (necessary for group moral relations/xenophobia)
in-group distinguished from out-group(s) (necessary for group moral relations/xenophobia)
inheritance rules (reduces conflict within families and communities)
institutions (organized coactivities) (religion)
insulting (communication of moral approval/disapproval)
intention (part of moral reasoning and judgment)
interpolation (part of moral reasoning and judgment)
interpreting behavior (necessary for moral judgment)
judging others (foundation of moral approval/disapproval)
kin, close distinguished from distant (foundation of kin selection and kin altruism)
kin groups (foundation of kin selection/altruism and basic social group)
kin terms translatable by basic relations of procreation (foundation of kin selection and kin altruism)
kinship statuses (foundation of kin selection and kin altruism)
language employed to manipulate others (communication of moral approval/disapproval)
language employed to misinform or mislead (communication of moral approval/disapproval)
language not a simple reflection of reality (symbolic moral reasoning)
law (rights and obligations) (foundation of social harmony)
law (rules of membership) (foundation of social harmony)
likes and dislikes (foundation of moral judgment)
logical notion of “equivalent” (symbolic moral reasoning)
logical notion of “general/particular” (symbolic moral reasoning)
logical notion of “not” (symbolic moral reasoning)
logical notion of “opposite” (symbolic moral reasoning)
logical notion of “part/whole” (symbolic moral reasoning)
logical notions (symbolic moral reasoning)
magic (religion and superstitious behavior)
magic to increase life (religion and superstitious behavior)
magic to sustain life (religion and superstitious behavior)
magic to win love (moral manipulation)
making comparisons (necessary for moral judgments)
male and female and adult and child seen as having different natures (differences in moral behavior)
males dominate public/political realm (gender differences in moral behavior)
males engage in more coalitional violence (gender differences in moral behavior)
males more aggressive (gender differences in moral behavior)
males more prone to lethal violence (gender differences in moral behavior)
males more prone to theft (gender differences in moral behavior)
manipulate social relations (social moral control)
marriage (moral rules of foundational relationship)
mental maps (symbolic moral reasoning)
metaphor (symbolic moral reasoning)
mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances (religious ritual)
moral sentiments (the foundation of all morality)
moral sentiments, limited effective range of (parameters of moral foundation)
mother normally has consort during child-rearing years (gender differences in moral behavior)
mourning (expression of grief part of symbolic moral reasoning)
murder proscribed (moral judgment necessary in communities)
music related in part to religious activity (religious rituals)
myths (foundation of both religion and teaching of moral principles)
narrative (foundation of myths)
normal distinguished from abnormal states (necessary for moral judgment)
Oedipus complex (kin selection, moral assessment of appropriate/inappropriate relations)
oligarchy (de facto) (group social control)
past/present/future (necessary for symbolic moral reasoning)
person, concept of (foundation for moral judgment)
planning for future (foundation for moral judgment)
preference for own children and close kin (nepotism)
prestige inequalities (leads to moral conflict)
pride (a moral sense)
private inner life (foundation for moral reasoning and judgment)
promise (moral relations)
property (foundation of moral reasoning and judgment)
proverbs, sayings (teaching moral principles)
proverbs, sayings in mutually contradictory forms (teaching moral principles)
psychological defense mechanisms (psychology of moral sense and assessment)
rape (behavior leading to relational conflict)
rape proscribed (behavior morally judged)
reciprocal exchanges (of labor, goods, or services) (reciprocal altruism)
reciprocity, negative (revenge, retaliation) (reduces reciprocal altruism)
reciprocity, positive (enhances reciprocal altruism)
redress of wrongs (moral conflict resolution)
resistance to abuse of power, to dominance (moral conflict resolution)
rites of passage (religious ritual, foundation of moral assessment and judgment)
rituals (religion and morality)
sanctions (social moral control)
sanctions for crimes against the collectivity (social moral control)
sanctions include removal from the social unit (social moral control)
self distinguished from other self as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomous
self is responsible (foundation of moral reasoning)
self-control (moral assessment and judgment)
self-image, awareness of (concern for what others think) (foundation of moral reasoning)
self-image, manipulation of (foundation of moral reasoning)
self-image, wanted to be positive (foundation of moral reasoning)
sex statuses (social hierarchy)
sexual attraction (foundation of major moral relations and tensions)
sexual attractiveness (foundation of major moral relations and tensions)
sexual jealousy (foundation of major moral relations and tensions)
sexual modesty (foundation of major moral relations and tensions)
sexual regulation (foundation of major moral relations and tensions)
sexual regulation includes incest prevention (foundation of major moral relations and tensions)
sexuality as focus of interest (foundation of major moral relations and tensions)
shame (moral sense)
snakes, wariness around (foundation of religious ritual and mythology)
social structure (foundation of morality in humans)
socialization (foundation of morality in humans)
socialization expected from senior kin (foundation of morality in humans)
statuses and roles (foundation of morality in humans)
statuses, ascribed and achieved (foundation of morality in humans)
statuses distinguished from individuals (foundation of morality in humans)
statuses on other than sex, age, or kinship bases (foundation of morality in humans)
stinginess, disapproval of (social and moral control mechanism)
succession (foundation of social hierarchy)
symbolic speech (foundation of moral reasoning and communication)
symbolism (foundation of moral reasoning)
tabooed foods (element in moral and social control)
tabooed utterances (communication of moral and social control)
taboos (moral and social control)
territoriality (social control)
time (religion, moral reasoning)
time, cyclicity of (religion, moral reasoning)
trade (part of social relations)
triangular awareness (assessing relationships among the self and two other people) (foundation of moral judgment)
true a
nd false distinguished (necessary for moral assessment and judgment)
turn taking (conflict prevention)
violence, some forms of proscribed (moral and social control)
visiting (social relations)
weapons (conflict resolution)
worldview (foundation of all religion and morality)
NOTES
Prologue: One Long Argument
1 Cited in Timothy Ferris, Red Limit (New York: Random House, 1996).
2 I went so far as to elevate Darwin’s observation to a dictum in my first column in my monthly series in Scientific American, April 2001, entitled “Colorful Pebbles and Darwin’s Dictum.”
3 Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstitions, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997; 2nd ed., New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2002).
4 Michael Shermer, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1999; 2nd ed., New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2003).
5 Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1894), p. 238.
6 R. Sloan, E. Bagiella, and T. Powell, The Lancet, vol. 353 (February 20, 1999), pp. 664—67. See also: Skeptic, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 8. Article reviews recent studies on prayer and healing, noting a number of serious methodological flaws in the studies, including: (1) Lack of control of intervening variables (for example, most of these studies did not control for age, sex, education, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, marital status, and degree of religiosity or religious devotion, all of which can influence outcomes); (2) Failure to control for multiple comparisons (for example, in one study twenty-nine outcome variables were measured but only six were significantly altered by prayer, and in other studies different outcome variables were found to be significant, so there was no consistency across studies).
1: Transcendent Morality
1 Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
2 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 371.
3 See Paul Edwards, “Socrates,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 7:482.
4 Ibid.
5 E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 238—65. For a concise summary, see also E. O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 281, no. 4 (1998), pp. 53—70.
6 This section was originally composed as an exercise in preparation for media interviews during the book tour planned for the publication of this book. These tours are arduous voyages across the cultural landscape of information dissemination. Early morning radio and television talk shows are followed by print interviews during lunch, afternoon signings at retail bookstores, a talk show or two tossed into the schedule in the late afternoon, followed by an evening lecture and signing, then a mad dash to the airport to get to the next city in order to do it all again the next day. It is déjà vu all over again until all cities come to look alike. Lights out is after midnight with a wake-up call before five the next morning. I have embarked on two such voyages, so I have learned to do what politicians on the campaign trail call “staying on message.” What they mean is that no matter what question is asked or how many distractions are encountered, deliver the message you brought—quickly and succinctly. To an author in the modern world of sound-bite briefness, this entails distilling hundreds of pages of text into a handful of bulleted points and condensing thousands of hours of research into a five-minute summation. The exercise, however, is not a fruitless one because it forces the author to think through the theory carefully and sort out what is necessary and what is superfluous. In the end both author and reader profit.
7 Michael Novak, “Skeptical Inquirer,” review of How We Believe, by Michael Shermer, Washington Post, February 13, 2000, p. 7.
2. Why We Are Moral
1 . Barry H. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner’s, 1978).
2 Gerald S. Wilkinson, “Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat,” Nature, vol. 308 (1984), pp. 181—84. See also Lisa K. DeNault and Donald A. McFarlane, “Reciprocal Altruism Between Male Vampire Bats, Desmodus rotundus,” Animal Behaviour, vol. 49 (1995), pp. 855—56.
3 Frans B. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 60—61; see also Frans B. de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
4 De Waal, Good Natured, p. 77.
5 In Michael Shermer, “The Pundit of Primate Politics: An Interview with Frans de Waal,” Skeptic, vol. 8, no. 2 (2000), pp. 29—35.
6 Cited in de Waal, Good Natured, p. 42.
7 Cynthia Moss, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988).
8 Two outstanding sources of both include Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Viking, 1997).
9 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
10 Jared Diamond, “The Religious Story,” review of Darwin’s Cathedral, by David Sloan Wilson, New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002.
11 Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Alison Jolly, Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Frans B. de Waal, ed., Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Steven A. LeBlanc, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).
12 Neil Roberts, The Holocene: An Environmental History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
13 For a more in-depth analysis of this relationship between politics and religion, see Jared Diamond, “The Religious Story,” and Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality.”
14 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Stark and Bainbridge, Religion, Deviance, and Social Control (New York: Routledge, 1997).
15 Diamond, “The Religious Story.” See also the summary and analysis of hunter-gatherer social behavior and the propensity for violence against out-group members in all primate species, including and especially our hominid ancestors, in LeBlanc, Constant Battles.
16 For an evolutionary interpretation of the Old Testament and Talmud, see John Hartung, “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality,” Skeptic, vol. 3, no. 4 (1995), pp. 86—99. Although I am using these examples to support a group selection model of evolution, Hartung rejects group selection; his interpretation is based strictly on individual, organismal selection.
17 Georges R. Tamarin, “The Influence of Ethnic and Religious Prejudice on Moral Judgment,” New Outlook, vol. 9, no. 1 (1966), pp. 49—58, and Tamarin, The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Rotterdam University Press, 1973).
18 It should be noted that many rabbis reject this in-group evolutionary interpretation of the Old Testament and the Talmud. They point to passages such as Deut. 10:19, in which God commands: “Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” And Exod. 22:21: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” In Skeptic (vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 24—31), John Hartung and Rabbi Israel Chait, of Yeshiva B’Nei Torah in Far Rockaway, New York, exchanged views, with the latter defending Judaism as an inclusive and tolerant religion; the many in-group moral values found in the Old Testament, particularly in the Torah (the five books of Moses), are rare, taken out of context, or mistranslated from the original Hebrew, he argues. Neighbors, he says, also refers to non-Israelites. Hartung counters, however,
that the original language of the Bible, even with these caveats, still makes a sharp distinction between those people who are in the group and those people who are out of the group. When the moral commandment is given to treat “strangers,” “sojourners,” and “sojourning strangers” with kindness, the references are to Israelites who were guests in another Israelite tribe, not non-Israelites who were in most circumstances to be dealt with rather harshly.
19 Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree (New York: Harper & Bros., 1937).
20 Robert L. Bettinger, Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory (New York: Plenum Press, 1991), p. 158.
21 Napoleon A. Chagnon. Yanomamö, 4th ed. (New York: HBJ, 1992.), pp. 80—86.
22 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 61—79.
23 Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, p. 77.
24 Jerome H. Barkow, “Beneath New Culture is Old Psychology: Gossip and Social Stratification,” in The Adapted Mind, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.), pp. 627—28.
25 Personal correspondence, May 2000. There exists an impressive literature on the study of gossip. Here are a few references provided to me by Kari Konkola: Robin Dunbar , “The Chattering Classes (Have you heard the latest? Gossip, it seems, is what separates us from the animals. Far from being idle, it is vital for our safety—and even our survival),” Times London Magazine, February 5, 1994, pp. 28—29. M. Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology, vol. 4 (1967), pp. 307—16. S. A. Hellweg, “Organizational Grapevines,” in Progress in Communication Sciences, vol. 8, ed. Brenda Dervin and Melvin J. Voigt (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1987). William A. Henry, III, “Pssst … Did You Hear About?” Time, vol. 135, no. 10 (March 5, 1990), p. 46. Blythe Holbrooke, Gossip: How to Get It Before It Gets You and Other Suggestions for Social Survival (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). Nicholas Lemann, “Gossip, The Inside Scoop: A History of American Hearsay,” The New Republic (November 5, 1990). Jack Levin and Arnold Arluke, Gossip: The Inside Scoop (New York: Plenum Press, 1987). S. E. Merry, “Rethinking Gossip and Scandal,” in Toward a General Theory of Social Control, vol. 1: Fundamentals, ed. Donald Black (New York: Academic Press, 1984), pp. 271—302. L. Morrow, “The Morals of Gossip,” The Economist (October 26, 1991), p. 64. Ralph L. Rosnow and G. A. Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (New York: Elesevier Scientific, 1976). Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Charles K. West, The Social and Psychological Distortion of Information (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981).
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