alright once more into this thing about getting morality out of evolution. let me just remind anyone who's forgotten that i don't believe in god and i think natural selection has to more or less be true. now let me add that i agree entirely with de waal and kropotkin and gould that cooperative activity is adaptive, or more strongly that without it the species would hardly have got going before extinction. so here's my only question: have you now explicated morality's binding force? have you justified your moral values? no. not even a little. 

first of all, though it is not implausible to think that cooperation is selected for, it is also not implausible to think that competition, murder, rape, and war are also selected for. depends on your circs. a pacifist human species would never have arisen. and since the basic form of the argument from evolution (though this is certainly wrong) is that any quality that the species widely displays must be or have been adaptive, then of course our violence and destruction emerges from evolution as surely as our cooperation. the only reason de waal does not believe that evolution teaches that we ought to kill the folks across the river is because he starts out with a moral theory, which he will work evolution to support.

and let's just say, counter-factually, that evolution always only selects for cooperation, and that any failure to cooperate is counter-adaptive. well this supports the idea that we ought to cooperate only only the further premise that the human race ought to exist. i, personally, reject this supposition utterly. but evolution itself certainly rejects it: there is no more reason the species ought to exist than that it ought not. evolution uses extinction just the way it uses flourishing, and just keeps right on. it no more favors the human than the protazoa. it loved the humble pterodactyl no less than it loved sir isaac newton, and killed them both indifferently.

even if it were the case that we always do actually cooperate, as evolution prescribes - the absolutely best possible set of facts for the evolutionary moralists - still it would not follow that we ought to cooperate. but of course we don't always cooperate. if evolution could justify anything, it would justify only exactly what is actually the case. a beautiful thought, but hardly a reasonable moral system or way to show that war is wrong, etc. it's adaptive insofar as it's actual. evolution selected for it insofar as it actually occurs (again that can't be right, but there is no other argument).

i propose that what i've just said is entirely decisive: a knock-down demonstration that the position of de waal or sam harris is false. it is obviously false, justified precisely only by wishful thinking. interacting with apes all day doesn't bear on this matter at all.

i guess what i'd ask de waal is why he wants a substitute for god.