Status Updates From Moral Origins: The Evolutio...

It’s likely, after at least 45,000 years of individuals gaining fitness by whispering back and forth about other people’s behavior behind their backs, that discreet and intimate socially evaluative “talking” is part of our evolved capacity to behave morally—just as the internalization of rules surely is. Thus, gossiping serves us today as it served our ancestors in the past.

One of the remarkable things about xenophobic tendencies in contemporary hunter-gatherers, and for that matter in all humans, is that our moral codes apply fully only within the group, be it a language group, a nonliterate population that shares the same piece of real estate or the same ethnic identity, or a nation.

Humans are moral because we are genetically set up to be that way, and it’s of interest that today’s small children turn into increasingly moral beings in highly predictable stages. Sympathetic feelings for others in need of help arrive quite early in infants, as does a primitive sense of right and wrong. These developments are followed by a general sense of rules which arrive later when children reach school age.