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Charles LeRoy Scamahorn (1935 – fl 2021) is a philosopher of the origins of human morality and humanity’s survival. Modern humans were created and are maintained by gossiping women.

Charles LeRoy Scamahorn

 

Charles Scamahorn, philosopher of the evolution of human morality.

COMMENT on the strategy of these Probaway maximizing posts.

The end goal of this series of posts is to create short statements of ideas derived from thinkers. The views are intended to be concise and stimulating of thoughts that can clash against other Probaway maxims in the collection. With an average of forty or so statements from each individual from this beginning list of about two hundred people, there will be approximately eight thousand statements to work with. Probaway’s maxim statements have been numbered and also numbered in the individual thinker’s list of quotes. The goal is to make possible referencing a clash with only four numbers. (I may renumber the authors at some point to make the system easier to use.)

The final goal is to find new ideas formed by clashing these ideas together. There are probably ideas that will appear obvious once stated, but no one has ever published them. The system might be used to generate online games for creating new ideas. If that could become a popular game, it would generate many useful ideas.

[This statement was entered the same day I reposted it on the Probaway maxims sequence as Charles Scamahorn — Maxims #137]

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The source of human morality was gossiping women.

Everything about humans that evolved 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. The human-animal body’s health and resultant vitality are attractive to potential sex partners, but when one becomes sick and unhealthy, which has a heritable component, 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 are very slow compared to Evish Selection practiced by women. Evish Selection was routinely practiced by women selecting mates eighty thousand years ago before Artificial Selection was practiced by domesticated men about twelve thousand years ago. At that time farming and herding began appearing fixed locations near Gobekli Tepe Turkey, became possible.

Women choose their mates only in part based on physical beauty; they choose their mates, hopefully, to be their lifelong husbands, based on a large variety of other qualities too. Once 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. A woman would want her mate to keep unwanted men and other dangers 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 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 qualities beyond morality that women were aware of when discussing good mates, but the source of human morality is of interest to philosophers, and therefore has been entered into the Philosophers Squared list.

Human morality is based on carefully refined gossip entering our genetic code.

“Evish selection is a new term delineating what we humans have been doing to other humans for over 50,000 years. It is a form of sexual selection but with a human difference. The older type of sexual selection tends to choose a single quality marker for genetic health and thus environmental adaptedness, but Evish selection chooses a composite of many, many qualities. Human women make their selection of mates based not only on animal vigor but on all of the qualities in a mate, including those that distinguish humans from other animals. It is a very complex decision process because the environment is very complex, and the qualities being valued are difficult to assess, even for modern women. Women converse at great length with each other about the various human qualities, which is generally given the derogatory name of gossip. But, it is this measuring of humans against some infinitely variable complex of qualities which is what gossip is about, and it is what ultimately improves the quality of the human species from one generation to the next.”

Personal COMMENTS

It is outrageous to place oneself in a list with so many fantastically successful philosophers, and yet I have created the most coherent theory of why people have risen from an animal state to the condition they now occupy. We are not only highly intelligent animals, we are also surprisingly social ones and this is permitted by our innate morality. Without our morality our civilization could not have arisen and thus the understanding of the source of our morality is of fundamental philosophical importance.

Modern humans were created and are maintained by gossiping women.

I have not been totally isolated from the philosophical, anthropological, linguistic community, having had personal conversations about this subject with various leading people in those fields, but Evish Selection is wholly my idea.

Voltaire (1694 – 1778) said it well, “We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence.” I agree, but suggest that it was the cumulative intelligence of women that created our Newtons.

 
Michaelangelo's Adam and Goya's Eve combined

 

Eve choosing Adam, with a little gossip from her friends, for his many qualities.

Many qualities combine to make up morality, and there must be many genetically heritable genes underlying character, but because of these genes, people are now moral because it is now part of their genetic inheritance to be virtuous. 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 creatures from the beginning, but we are also self-serving animals from the start. There is always a struggle going on within our manifest behavior of balancing the multitude of conflicting inner impulses. The basic animal needs for survival are always there to protect the life of the animal we inhabit. However, these necessities are overladen and often controlled by the human need to live within the local human society’s strictures and the genetically directed developments of a human moral code.

These genes guiding our moral development were bred into us by our female ancestors choosing virtuous men, just like they selected men with all the other qualities that make us humans what we have become as a species. Our innate moral propensity is as deeply bred into humans as is our capacity 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 speak. Some people become wonderfully skillful with language, and some develop their moral sensitivities to a high degree. Having a fine moral sense isn’t the same as taking graduate classes in ethics, but that moral sense can 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, who choose to marry those men who possess those moral qualities to the highest degree and train their daughters to select mates by the same criteria.

 

Darwin’s Unfinished Business — Human evolution was controlled by emergent human women. — Intelligent Design – of humans by humans and for humans. — Charles Darwin’s original idea !!! — Triage is an application of natural selection. — — Creating The EarthArk is the most moral thing humanity can do. — Creating the Intelligent Universe