Human evolution... How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong..

            Human evolution is the evolutionary process leading up to the appearance of modern humans. While it began with the last common ancestor of all life, the topic usually covers only the evolutionary history of primates, in particular the genus Homo, and the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of hominids (or "great apes"). The study of human evolution involves many scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, ethology, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, embryology and genetics.

Genetic studies show that primates diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period, and the earliest fossils appear in the Paleocene, around 55 million years ago. The family Hominidae diverged from the Hylobatidae (Gibbon) family 15-20 million years ago, and around 14 million years ago, the Ponginae (orangutans) diverged from the Hominidae family. Bipedalism is the basic adaption of the Hominin line, and the earliest bipedal Hominin is considered to be either Sahelanthropus or Orrorin, with Ardipithecus, a full bipedal, coming somewhat later. The gorilla and chimpanzee diverged around the same time, about 4-6 million years ago, and either Sahelanthropus or Orrorin may be our last shared ancestor with them. The early bipedals eventually evolved into the australopithecines and later the genus Homo.

In Hauser’s view, the moral faculty is triggered by the perception of an action or the omission of an action and automatically produces a judgment that is sensitive to the action’s (or omission’s) causes and consequences and to whether the consequences
were intended or foreseen. Actions are perceived to have more moral weight than omissions, and intended harms are seen to be morally worse than foreseen harms. Using his ongoing Web-based surveys, Hauser has amassed an enormous amount of evidence demonstrating that these distinctions are made in the same way in all cultures, across all educational levels, and by both sexes.
 But subjects are typically unable to articulate adequate justifications for their judgments. Hauser takes this inability to be evidence for his view that we have a moral faculty that operates below
the level of conscious awareness. Once again he points out the parallels to linguistic competence. Just as it is easy for us to judge whether a sentence is grammatical but difficult for us to justify or explain that judgment, so we are able to judge the permissibility of an action easily but find ourselves unable to explain that judgment. Since our ability to make moral judgments outpaces our ability to justify them, moral judgment does not seem to be the product of rational reflection. Might it be the product of an emotional system instead? Hauser grants that moral judgments are typically accompanied by emotions, but
he suggests that these emotions are the result of the moral judgment rather than the cause. Part of his evidence for this claim comes from studies of patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These patients appear to have reduced
emotional responses to moral harms, yet their judgments appear to be identical to those of
normal subjects when confronted with most moral dilemmas. Hauser nonetheless believes that emotions powerfully influence moral performance — by influencing our motivation to act morally — but that the moral faculty itself is independent of the emotional system. Moral competence is the product of an innate moral faculty whose optional parameters and exceptions are determined by the culture into which each of us is born. There is little doubt that this book, written for a general audience, is the most important attempt to date to explain the psychological mechanisms of moral judgments. However, Hauser has made
the unusual decision to publish it well before all the experimental data are in. For this reason, the book is sometimes frustratingly vague on key questions. Is the moral faculty cognitively penetrable — that is, can a person gradually alter its parameters througreflection — or is it more like the visual system, which remains subject to visual illusions even when we know full well that they are illusions? What accounts for the differences in moral judgments among people who grow up in the same culture, a difference that has no obvious parallel in the linguistic sphere? It would be churlish to criticize Hauser for the lack
of clarity and detail on such matters. Moral Minds
Copyright ©By Marc D. Hauser
   

Taken in: France / Île-de-France / Paris / Quartier du Jardin-des-Plantes (show map)

Taken on: May 25, 2014

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