Even in these modern days, a chillingly large number of people is absolutely certain in their conviction that the human morality and rules of society are god-given and that without religion, none of these would exist. They seem to think that if you are not religious (and mind, most of the time they don't really care what crap you believe in, just as long as you do) then there is nothing that will prevent you from killing your own and other's babies, eating them up while conducting wild orgies with decent people's wives and animals.
Being an atheist myself, I don't have the privilege to use the god explanation as an easy way out, so the question remains - where does our morals come from? I will try to dissect this question over a series of articles, looking at different animal species, early humans and contemporary humans. I have to warn you already at this point that I have no real answers, but will just lay out some facts as I see them, and let you make the final conclusion. So where do we start?
If we go sideways in the evolutionary tree and look at our peer animals that exist in it alongside with us, can we see anything that looks like morals? For example bees and ants - it is the hard-wired morality that is keeping their societies working? Every day, millions of these insects work hard, put their lives on line to protect the queen and the hive (stack) and interact decently with their peers. It does bear some resemblance to our understanding of morality, doesn't it? If a drone was to kill another drone (or even a queen), would this be an immoral act? I'm not sure how often this happens (anybody who knows?) but I doubt these drones would be allowed to mate with the next queen, once she arrives. So the process of evolution will remove any such tendencies pretty quickly. So is this bee-morality? I'll leave it up to you to decide.
One argument that is almost inevitable at this point is that for morality, we need to have a free choice (will), and bees are hard-wired in their behavior, so they do not have a free choice, thus no morality. They never even risk to act immorally - they are born and made to act nicely. And when such bee is born that acts immorally (the drone that kills the queen), it is an anomaly. However, by doing this we are opening the Pandora's box of free will, and I'll refrain of going deeper into this (at this time).
(to be continued...)
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