Re: Human species ‘may split in two’: evolutionaary theorist
On Oct 18, 2006, at 10:04 AM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
[WS:] What truly amazes me is that such paper and pencil
“theorists” survive in the academe in the era when empirical neuroscience and genetics are making a real progress.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/darwin/people.htm
Oliver completed his PhD thesis — on the evolution of human moral
sentiments — in the Government Department of the LSE. His thesis
used recent developments in evolutionary game theory, animal
behaviour and evolutionary psychology to further the goal of placing
the study of morality on a sound scientific basis.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000441/
Morality as natural history
Curry, Oliver (2005) Morality as natural history. PhD thesis, London
School of Economics and Political Science, University of London.
Abstract
What are moral values and where do they come from? David Hume argued
that moral values were the product of a range of passions, inherent
to human nature, that aim at the common good of society. Recent
developments in game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behaviour,
psychology and neuroscience suggest that Hume was right to suppose
that humans have such passions. This dissertation reviews these
developments, and considers their implications for moral philosophy.
I first explain what Darwinian adaptations are, and how they generate
behaviour. I then explain that, contrary to the Hobbesian caricature
of life in the state of nature, evolutionary theory leads us to
expect that organisms will be social, cooperative and even altruistic
under certain circumstances. I introduce four main types of
cooperation – kin altruism, coordination to mutual advantage,
reciprocity and conflict resolution –and provide examples of
‘adaptations for cooperation’ from nonhuman species. I then review
the evidence for equivalent adaptations for cooperation in humans.
Next, I show how this Humean-Darwinian account of the moral
sentiments can be used to make sense of traditional positions in meta-
ethics; how it provides a rich deductive framework in which to locate
and make sense of a wide variety of apparently contradictory
positions in traditional normative ethics; and how it clearly
demarcates the problems of applied ethics. I defend this version of
ethical naturalism against the charge that it commits ‘the
naturalistic fallacy’. I conclude that evolutionary theory provides
the best account yet of the origins and status of moral values, and
that moral philosophy should be thought of as a branch of natural
history.
[full text: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000441/01/curryphd.pdf]