Sharing (and other complex social behaviour that outwardly appears altruistic) within social groups is seen much more broadly than in chimpanzees or primates. One generally doesn’t have to look beyond conventional evolution by natural selection to explain it. In itself, it is not evidence of ethical behaviour. If you could demonstrate that the sharing was motivated by a codified sense of obligation predicated on a moral sense of right and wrong, that would do it. That’s not an easy project and so far, as far as I know, nobody has been able to make a convincing case for it.
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FWIW, many decades ago, we watched from the Santa Cruz pier as an injured seal (or sea lion) was being carried a pretty long ways by another seal back to the rock where the seal colony lived. It seemed quite like a very difficult effort.
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Or thinking that their least-favorite invasive species deserves a torturous death instead of euthanasia, because invasive.
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What if “moral sense of right and wrong” was also a product of “conventional evolution by natural selection”?
What if, indeed. Are you suggesting this is the case? If so, would you be so kind as to share the evidence for that.
Human culture is widely accepted to be an emergent property of genetically-based human social behaviour that is based on a different information system than genetically-based “biological” evolution. The information stored in human brains and transmitted through language is subject to its own evolutionary processes that differ in important respects from the selective forces acting on genes. In particular, genes are transmitted from generation to generation by direct copying of information; mutations are errors in the copying process and happen infrequently enough that rapid evolution is rare. Cultural information (what Richard Dawkins called memes) is transmitted through speech and writing and the information is subject to all sorts of copying errors that don’t challenge genetic processes. For that reason, cultural evolution can be quite rapid.
Ethics is a product of cultural processes, by definition. It is codified information that is created and stored through cultural processes.
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is that reed canary grass?
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