The Past And Future Of Good And Evil

Sometime in the last few million years, our ancestors began to get better brains, use tools and weapons, speak language, and live in larger groups in a wider range of environments. A big key to all this was cultural natural selection. Though at first DNA and cultural evolution often pushed in different directions, the fact that culture could drive change so much faster let culture tame DNA, and induce it to make us especially plastic and receptive to culture.Early on, sufficient brains, culture, weapons, and language let us create social norms, i.e., “good” and “evil”. At first their main application was to suppress the often violent internal competition that had previously limited feasible primate group size. Our norms said to help and share, and not hit, threaten, brag, or form subgroup coalitions. “Good” was following moral instincts and prestige incentives to take collective actions and enforce norms to prevent dangerous competition, while “evil” was conspiring in the shadows to…