more on evolution and morality

found an interesting article on chimpanzees that touches on culture, intelligence, and social norms among our closest living relatives. Aside from the revelation that in some respects chimpanzees are actually more intelligent then humans – they have a much more developed short-term memory – I found the article particularly interesting for its description of the way tribes of Chimps take care of disabled members, and the specific example of a tribe that all cooperates to take care of a member with Cerebral Palsy.

Among humans (at least in “Western” cultures), children often pick on and abuse disabled peers. Not so among chimps. And Bonobos, well let’s just say that if Chimps reflect some of our worst most antisocial tendencies then Bonobos are the hippies of the primate world. At least most of the time. Probably. Maybe. Actually, no one really knows because human wars have destroyed most of their natural habitat so almost all the data on them is based on studies of Bonobos in captivity. But I digress…. In any case, what is certain is that despite their very human capacity for violence, both Bonobos and chimpanzees are far better at taking care of members of their own tribes who can’t take care of themselves then we humans seem to be. Or at least better then we Americans, here in “God’s Country,” seem to be.

I’d like to extend an invitation to all of the godmongers who believe that morality only comes from religion to explain how it is that human children would consistently be less moral then our primate cousins who are (fortunately for them) free from the delusions of organized religion. Seriously. I’d be hard pressed to think of anything more immoral then abusing someone that cannot defend themselves, something that seems to be taboo among other Apes but is commonplace among modern Homo Sapiens.  I’d go so far as to say that taking advantage of other people and exploiting others for profit is the  basis of our entire political and economic system.

Don’t get me wrong here, Great Apes are not the new “noble savages”, their cultures are often violent and Chimpanzees at least have their own forms of warfare which parallel warfare among tribal human societies. They are not “perfect” (whatever that means!), but their imperfections seem to mirror our own and studying in a respectful way can tell us a lot about ourselves. At the minimum that would mean an end to the insanely brutal and exploitive practice of mutilating them by the hundreds of thousands in laboratories around the world and a serious move to preserve and defend their habitats and their right to exist in their own way. There is something very sick and fundamentally immoral about the argument that it is acceptable to mutilate and murder our closest living relatives in order to test medicines for our own use – let alone eyeliners and detergents! It is a sickness that is, perhaps, uniquely human – the belief that we are the only ones who matter and the rest of the world exists for us to rape and pillage for our own profit and amusement. A sickness that has its foundation, to my mind at least, in our absurd belief that we are somehow the chosen favorites of the God(s), set apart to rule over and dominate all other forms of life. If we approach the entire universe as though it exists merely for our own uses, is it any wonder that we would turn our rapacious greed inward and enslave each other? The two are connected at every level – the exploitation of humans by humans and of the natural world by humans. They are justified using the same rhetoric of God(s) and “natural” superiority, and they are both immoral for the same reason. A moral usage of Power requires the responsibility to protect, not the right to exploit.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a recent global study showed a direct correlation between belief in god, crime rates, and teen pregnancy. Belief in a Supreme Being who has set humanity above the rest of “creation” to rule over it is the opposite of morality, not its source.

We are not made in the image of any deity any more then our cousins are (Seriously folks, if God made Man in His image, whose image did He make chimpanzees in? Perhaps he made them in 98.75% of his image?) . We are not the peak of the evolutionary ladder, far from! In fact we’re just one more twig on a very large tree. Our blood contains the same salination level as the oceans did when our first ancestors crawled out of it. Too much salt and we die, too little and we die. We carry that ancient ocean around inside of us in the 50-65% of our bodies that is made up of water. As embryos we first develop proto-gills (though they are never actually used for breathing and eventually morph into our jaws) and then tails – just a few of the many relics of our ancestors. We were not sculpted out of the clay by God in the Garden of Eden any more then we were sculpted from Water and Earth by Prometheus. Deal with it.

And the chimps? Well, if we can restrain ourselves from destroying their homes and driving them extinct (if we consider genocide a crime against humanity, why isn’t xenocide considered an even worse offense?), I get the distinct impression that there is a lot more they could teach us – starting with how important it is to take care of our less capable relations.

Posted: August 6th, 2007 under ecology, gods & religion, science and history.
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