An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics Read Online Free PDF

physiology and human psychology: evolution by natural selection. A complete understanding of the human mind, according to evolutionary psychologists, requires understanding the evolutionary pressures that shaped it so many millions of years ago. We do not come into the world as blank slates, as many commonly assume. Instead, they argue, our heads are full of psychological adaptations .
    Of course, when asked to think of evolutionary adaptations most of us think of anatomical features like a duck's webbed feet or a lizard's camouflaged skin. According to the standard account, webbed feet initially arose as a result of a genetic mutation; because webbed feet enabled their possessor to out-reproduce its neighbors (all things considered), over time webbed feet spread to the entire population. Evolutionary psychologists are proposing a similar account for mental features. At some point in the distant past, a certain mental system arose in an individual as a result of a genetic mutation; this system altered her psychology – the way she thought or felt or reasoned or desired. And because this system enabled her to out-reproduce her neighbors (all things considered), over time that mental system spread to the entire population. Speaking grandly, we might say that just as webbed feet are part of a duck's nature, so, too, certain ways of thinking or reasoning or desiring are part of human nature.
    Returning for a moment to our main theme (i.e. the human moral sense), we can put our question this way: Is having a moral sense part of human nature, where that nature is best explained by evolution by natural selection? As we'll see below, in order to answer that question we will need to look carefully at the kind of adaptive problem (if any) that our moral sense was designed to solve. Webbed feet, for instance, helped solve the problem of efficient movement through water. If our moral sense is indeed an adaptation, then there should be good evidence that possession of such a sense helped to solve (or to solve more successfully than one's neighbors) a particular adaptive problem. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's look more closely at the details of evolutionary psychology.
    1.5 An Evolved Mental Tool-Box Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that the human mind is equipped with many (some say very many) different evolved psychological mechanisms. Instead of viewing the mind as containing a single all-purpose “problem-solver,” evolutionary psychologists view the mind in roughly the way we view the body. We know the body does not contain a single anatomical mechanism to deal with the body's journey through the world. Rather, it contains different mechanisms to confront different problems: a liver to filter out toxins, lungs to take in oxygen, antibodies to fight off bacteria and viruses, and so on. It's true that each mechanism is profoundly limited in what it can do (your digestive system is a pretty bad listener), but this cost is more than offset by the benefits. With only one task to complete, each system should be able to do it efficiently, economically, and quite reliably. 6 And even if other systems break down (you lose your eyesight, for example), most other systems should remain operational.
    Evolutionary psychologists contend that this is the way we should understand the human mind. 7 Like the body, the mind requires different mechanisms to deal with different tasks. After all, the alternative to this picture – a single, all-purpose psychological mechanism – is, say evolutionary psychologists, hard to accept: The idea that a single generic substance can see in depth, control the hands, attract a mate, bring up children, elude predators, outsmart prey, and so on, without some degree of specialization, is not credible. Saying that the brain solves these problems because of its “plasticity” is not much better than saying it solves them by magic. (Pinker 1997: 75) What we're left with, then, is what some