Ape Mind, Old Mind, New Mind: Emotional Fossils and the Evolution of the Human Spirit by John Wylie

Author:John Wylie [Wylie, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John V. Wylie
Published: 2018-01-28T23:00:00+00:00

The Evolution of Justice and morality

Morality is a system of rules under which a group of monogamously bonded mates can function most productively together. But morality flowed from justice. Justice was naturally selected because of the productivity and fertility that resulted from the coordination of behavior that it permitted.

The Thou Shalt Not rules of the Ten Commandments emphasize the predominance of inhibition in the establishment of morality. Pressure had been applied by the intensity of aversion to the two socializing fears of interpersonal separation and social entrapment plus the threat of banishment. The resulting compression placed on dominance and submission collapsed them together into the single group structure of obedience to the authority of justice internally tightly bound together by the intense emotional restraints of guilt, shame and righteous indignation.

Authority was not initially evolved to enhance the dominance of individual humans; it was the authority of justice itself that was naturally selected to dominate individuals. And why was, and is, justice naturally selected? Because a just relationship, whether between a mated pair-bond or distributed among the relationships of an entire nation, is the most productive of all social structures. Justice inherently begets bounty because productive bounty was the very quality for which justice was naturally selected.

To illustrate how these early hominin groups can be thought of as organism-like, biological models will be employed, the first of which illuminates the nature of the importance of morality to becoming human. The analogy is to homeobox genes, commonly known as HOX genes.[63]

When complex, multicellular animal life was first proliferating during the Cambrian explosion of life forms, a variety of basic body types evolved. The vast majority of creatures, from flies to elephants, follow a basic segmental body plan, known as a bauplan, from the mouth to the rear, such as a segment for fore­legs, arms or wings, and, with others in between, one for legs and fins. The HOX genes that underlie this basic body pattern have been strictly conserved for over half a billion years because, if they change, the fetus, which might grow a leg where the arm should be, would simply not survive. Just as HOX genes form the foundational bauplan of individual bodies, the genes underlying justice and morality can be viewed as similarly forming the bauplan of the collectively oriented mind within all hominin group-organisms. If the genetics of justice/morality go awry, the group fails.

Justice is about the enforcement of morality and was analogous to the immune system of these newly evolved hominin group-organisms. The function of an immune system is to detect and then reject those internal elements that threaten the integrity of the organism. The twin-sided group agency of authority and obedience became similarly sensitive to behaviors that were immoral, freeloading, or otherwise individually selfish and disruptive—those that would cause a group to fail. Those groups that did not evolve justice would not have been as productive as those that did and would have fallen by the wayside. Among hominins, the chronic primate conflict caused by

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