Comment by Afu on Ethical Inhibitions · 2008-10-20T17:44:59.000Z · LW · GW

I see no one has replied to Tyrrell's point. Probably because it goes at the heart of most arguments put forth in by evolutionary psychologists, that is that they are just so stories that can be told equally convincing in the opposite manner and their is not way of testing between two opposing arguments.

I'd like to take a slightly deeper criticism of EP in relationship to this post, that is the way EP in general ignores the effect of culture or simply assumes that culture some how arises directly from intelligence. First of all, at present we have no idea how something as complicated and higher order as morality would be controlled be controlled by genetics. We simply know too little about the brain and the genes that control it. Furthermore, the fact that the genetic code for the brain is much less complicated than the brain itself makes me skeptical that genes could directly cause something like morality.

I do not believe in any magical explanations of morality, so where does that leave me? Culture is what causes and controls morality and other brain phenomenon. Culture is an emmergent phenomenon on top of biology, that is the biologic evolution was necessary for culture to arise, but culture is able to act causally separate from biological evolution. On a superficial level this is obvious. What language you speak is obviously dependent on what culture you grow up in and not on your genes. I would argue that there are also deeper, more basic cultural practices, such as morality, that are probably pre linguistic, which gave rise to the universal elements of human nature such as linguistics.

This comment too long already, so I will just end by saying that it is foolish to completely discard cultural effects on human evolution, especially since we have knowledge about how culture affects things like morality, but almost no knowledge about how genetics affect it.