Everything about humans that was created in the last one hundred thousand years or so didn’t happen simply because of Natural Selection, or Sexual Selection, but primarily because of Evish Selection. This idea is based on the easy-to-make observation of the way humans choose sexual partners. Males are still primarily choosing their female partners based on a Sexual Selection strategy. They choose for physical beauty and based on that strategy the species has maintained a healthy condition. Health and resultant vitality of the animal body is attractive to potential sex partners, but when one becomes sick and unhealthy they are unattractive and have fewer children because they breed less. Sexual Selection changes the expression of the genes more quickly than Natural Selection, but both of these are very slow when compared to Evish Selection.
Women choose their mates only in part based on physical beauty but they choose their mates, hopefully to be their lifelong husbands, based on a large variety of other qualities too. Once the early human females developed the ability for rudimentary speech they began analyzing potential mates based on their combined verbal analysis with other women of the entire package of qualities possessed by the male potential mates. This selection process was particularly sensitive to the moral qualities of the men. The women would be very desirous of being protected by their potential husband, but also they would be very observant of how well he treated women. She would want him to keep unwanted men away but not at the price of being abused herself. Thus with a hundred thousand years of breeding with this as an important part of the selection criteria for a husband these moral qualities would be bred into the the human genome and human behavior, and we would see men of all the cultures of the world treating women with locally defined courtesy.
There are many facets which make up morality and there must be many genetically heritable genes underlying morality, but because of these genes people are now moral because it is now part of their genetic inheritance to be moral. We have bred into us the capacity to develop a refined and sophisticated morality just like we have bred into us the ability to learn and speak languages. These specific moral qualities are not fixed into the genes like the speaking of the English language isn’t fixed in the genes, but the ability to easily learn these things is there. We have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the thousands of languages spoken by humans, but we also have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the moral codes of the various groups of humanity. We are latent moral people from the beginning, but we are also self-serving animals from the beginning. There is always a struggle going on within our behavior of how to balance the multitude of conflicting impulses. The basic animal needs for survival are always there to protect the life of the animal, but these necessities are overladen and often controlled by the human need to live within the strictures of human society and the genetically directed developments of a human moral code.
These moral genes were bred into us by our ancestral women choosing moral men just like they selected for men with all the other qualities that make humans what we have become as a species. Our innate moral propensity is as deeply bred into humans as is our propensity to learn a language. Of course we can do many things with our moral ability just as we can do many things with our languages. We don’t need much human interaction to learn basic morality, just like we don’t need much human interaction to learn to talk. Some people become wonderfully skillful with language and some people develop their moral sensitivities to a high degree too. Having a fine moral sense isn’t the same as taking graduate classes in ethics but it is an ability to see and do the best thing for our interbreeding group of people. To carry that idea to its conclusion would be to define morality as doing the right thing as discussed at some length by a group of gossiping women and marrying themselves and training their daughters to choose those men who possessed those moral qualities to the highest degree.
Human morality is based on carefully refined gossip entering our genetic code.
