What is your take on evolution/old age earth?

[Scoobes]

Slimebeast said:

Final-Fan said:

@ Slimebeast:
"Your examples of social communities (like apes) that work well together for the best of their survival though social interactions, have their behaviour and rules based purely on instincts.

"But the rules and behaviour in human societies are not only based on instincts. They are also based on morals, which requires intellectual thinking and decisions and is something entirely different than genetically programmed instincts."

I would argue that you are massively underestimating the intelligence of apes to say that they are governed completely by instincts utterly beyond their control, rather than behaving according to social norms which are malleable by individual learning. 

That remains to be proven whether apes have morals or not. They're possibly a very unique exception.  But that's beside the point. The point was to address his huge misunderstanding of morals by ignoring the requirement of intellect.

But wait, individual learning of proper behaviour (social norms) is still not enough to fullfill the definition of morals. It could be just mental programming without any reason involved which is actually pretty basic and mechanical for animals. Obviously higher order species like rats and wolves individually learn a certain set of behavioural rules on top of their pure instincts, but that doesn't mean they have morals.

I'm just going to throw this in there, but wouldn't higher morals simply be a byproduct of the evolution of larger brains in Homo sapiens and higher ape species. Another animal to look at in the case of morals are dolphins who are the only other species I know of that will hold-off on mating with biological family members. This would go completely against  instinct, but the size of there brains would suggest the possibility of intellectual morality denying said base instinct. We've also seen dolphins behave differently and protectively when pregnant women (human) are in the water with them. That hardly seems instinctual when there is such a large species gap.

Another thing to remember is that not all humans share the same morals. Mental diseases in particular can change not just behaviour but a person's morals. Take anti-social personality disorder, where the person is incapable of feeling empathy for anyone but themselves. They have a very different moral compass to the rest of humans, or even apes and other mammals.