Evolution and Human ValuesRobert Wesson, Robert G. Wesson, Patricia A. Williams Rodopi, 1995 - 251 pages Initiated by Robert Wesson, Evolution and Human Values is a collection of newly written essays designed to bring interdisciplinary insight to that area of thought where human evolution intersects with human values. The disciplines brought to bear on the subject are diverse - philosophy, psychiatry, behavioral science, biology, anthropology, psychology, biochemistry, and sociology. Yet, as organized by co-editor Patricia A. Williams, the volume falls coherently into three related sections. Entitled Evolutionary Ethics, the first section brings contemporary research to an area first explored by Herbert Spencer. Evolutionary ethics looks to the theory of evolution by natural selection to find values for human living. The second section, Evolved Ethics, discusses the evolution of language and religion and their impact on moral thought and feeling. Evolved ethics was partly Charles Darwin's subject in The Descent of Man. The last section bears the title Scientific Ethics. A nascent field, scientific ethics asks about the evolution of human nature and the implications of that nature for ethical theory and social policy. Together, the essays collected here provide important contemporary insights into what it is - and what it may be - to be human. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 17 | |
TWO Cultural Being or Biological Being | 35 |
THREE Evolution Ethics and the Complexity | 49 |
FOUR The Moral Imperative of Our Future | 79 |
Its | 139 |
About the Contributers | 245 |
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Common terms and phrases
adaptive advance Alan Gewirth animals argued autoevolution believe biological biologists brain Cambridge Campbell causal century chimpanzees competitive interpretation complex conservatives cooperative interpretation correlation cultural Daniel Darwin Darwinian deities demographic dependence Depew differential fertility E. O. Wilson environment eugenicists eugenics evolution and ethics evolutionary biology evolutionary ethics evolutionary process evolutionary theory evolved ethics example Freud future genes genetic genome genotype human evolution human nature human rights humanists Huxley idea implications implicit gods important individual kin selection language liberal living mental modern moral natural selection offspring organisms parents persons phenotype philosophical political population primates problems productive programs progress reason reciprocal altruism reductionist relation religion religious reproductive role scientific selfish Sigmund Freud Social Darwinism society Sociobiology species studies suggests superego survival thought traditional University Press unseen values Weber welfare policy welfare recipients Wilson women York
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Page 19 - Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.