There is an article in Chronicle of Higher Education called “Moral in Tooth and Claw.” It cites people like Frans de Waal, Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson and essentially says that, despite some arguments to the contrary, “recent research in cognitive neuroscience and moral psychology suggests that human morality may be much more “animalistic” than Western philosophy has generally assumed.”

It seems to me obvious that human moral behaviour must have evolved from behavioural forms already existent in the species’ lineage.  Otherwise, how did it get there? No one (of any real knowledge) seriously questions the fact that the vestigal limbs of any number of creatures are there because there was once a set of ancestors to whom those limbs were not vestigal but very useful. No one (same caveat) questions the fact that development of things like eyes are based on, and evolve from, earlier visual-center forms.  That makes perfect sense.

It seems that there are only two reasons to question the development of morality from earlier forms. The first is because many of us still seem to have a stake in seeing human beings as fundamentally separate from non-human animals, and the second is because it is the mind.

The species chauvinism I think we will get over, as we have learned to get over thinking of other groups of people as something other than human. The ability to see the mind as something of the earth, of matter, that may take longer.

Still, my question stands. If not of our evolutionary history, then where does it come from?