I've read many of your posts, but I dare say I have gotten you confused with some others, because I find your comments to be extremely thought provoking and intelligent.

My background, although limited in cultural anthropologically ways, as well as a bit of psychology, is not apparently up to snuff in comparison to yours.

One author and occasional NOVA contributor is Desmond Morris. He challenges us to explore the struggle that we all endure over our inner animalistic characteristics, and our perceptions of morality.

As you discussed anger, I would address procreation. Per Morris, a man's purpose on this earth is to spread his seed to as many women and as many times as he can. This is the furtherance of our DNA and perhaps to God's calling. Women on the other hand are less "active" in consideration of several factors, including the need for a nuclear family to provide for her children, and the inability to produce beyond a certain limited number of pregnancies during her normal healthy life. Men have no such physical limitations. Ergo the term Fertile Octogarian.

"Morality" established by God, or by an evolutionary period in which "society" created certain "mores", have caused monogamy to become almost sacrosanct. But does that make it right? Again, this is a debate we can argue till now and the end of time.

However, I have digressed, my blog was to entertain the idea of what biases our own "Tribes" have, that have influenced our own thinking and behavior, whether it is considered good or bad. All Moral judgments aside, our Tribes tell us what is right and what is wrong.

Thank you again for your comments. My mind is now enjoying the cartwheels of thought that you have given to me.

You just happened to catch me when I was thinking about precisely this stuff.

[WARNING: Interminably long post follows. Proceed at own risk.]

I'm convinced that, given naturalism (a.k.a. atheism) plus Darwinism, one cannot make sense of common sense morality.

For instance, one cannot say that rape or the holocaust or slavery are objectively immoral. Insofar as we take moral judgments such as "Rape is wrong" to be objectively true, insofar as we believe there to be objective moral properties such as the rightness or wrongness of actions, justice and injustice, virtue and vice, we have reason to reject either naturalism or Darwinism or both.

Call the belief in objective moral properties Moral Realism. I am a moral realist. And I would argue that the Darwinian naturalist cannot consistently affirm moral realism.

Consider this quote from sociobiologists E.O. Wilson and Michael Ruse: “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate.” As the Darwinian story has it, what we call "morality" had its origins in certain "social instincts" and "sympathies" that, given the circumstances of survival, conferred reproductive fitness. It's fairly easy to construct a "Just So Story" to see how this might have happened. Our inescapable sense that we have a sacred duty to care for our own offspring will be said to have evolved from a basic instinctual urge to nurture them, and this is in place, of course, because human infants left unattended tend to do inelegant things like die and take with them our entire genetic bank account. (Notice that the maternal instinct of a sea turtle, for instance, ensures only that she lay her eggs somewhere above the high tide mark. Sea turtle hatchlings are very much on their own, and though the vast majority of them fall victim to predators or the elements within the first year, enough manage, through sheer numbers, to make it into the end zone to keep the species going.)

Or imagine a situation among our early ancestors in which there is strength in numbers. A tribe that consists of generally cooperative and compliant members is more likely to defeat rival tribes that are plagued with intra-tribal disputes, and they are also most likely to do well at hunting and gathering. And membership in a cooperative tribe has reproductive advantage because the individual members are that much more likely to survive to reproductive age and to find a mate. As the story goes, this causes selection pressure in favor of compliance--to oversimplify, call it the "cooperation gene."

After thousands of human generations, this relentless selection pressure has caused these original instincts to form what we call conscience, and the voice of conscience speaks to us as though it were the very Voice of God.

But, of course, on that story, the whole thing is purely subjective. Ruse again: “The Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity.”

In this sort of tradition, we have seen books such as Thornhill, et al, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. The authors argue that rape is a natural phenomenon, explained by the biological drive to pass on one's own genetic code.
(In those early times of uncertainty, the impregnation of three--or eight--women instead of one raises the probability of progeny immensely.) If you buy everything that Wilson, Ruse and Thornhill say, it is hard to see how you can maintain that rape is the atrocity that all people of good will take it to be.

However, Wilson and Ruse (and Desmond Morris, I think), have been charged with what Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea--a book-length defense of naturalism-plus-Darwinism) calls "greedy reductionism." As he wryly puts it, the fact that tribesmen have everywhere and always thrown their spears pointy-end first does not suggest a “pointy-end first gene.” Many such traits are instead to be attributed to “the general non-stupidity of the species.” Some things are just Good Ideas. And not a few contemporary philosophers have argued forcefully of late that our moral theorizing consists of Good Ideas as well.

Here's perhaps the core objection to the sort of reductionism that the sociobiologists are guilty of. It comes from the classic critique of sociobiology, Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition.

“All that selection may have done for us is to equip us with the capacity for various social arrangements and the capacity to formulate ethical rules. Recognizing that not every trait we care to focus on need have been the target of natural selection, we shall no longer be tempted to argue that any respectable history of our ethical behavior must identify some selective advantage for those beings who first adopted a system of ethical precepts. It is entirely possible that evolution fashioned the basic cognitive capacities—alles ubriges ist Menschenwerk.” Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985), p. 418.

However, I think the argument ultimately succeeds. Even if we grant that much of the content of morality is the product of culture and rational reflection, nevertheless, our most fundamental "moral" orientation--such as the maternal instinct that has been put in place--is, on Darwinism, the direct product of natural selection and is genetically hardwired. Any subsequent moral reflection of which we are capable is conditioned by such basic non-reflective promptings that are almost certainly explained as mere means to reproductive fitness. Here are two options for thinking about how it all went:

(a) We sense a deep obligation to care for our children because this basic instinct confers reproductive fitness (irrespective of the question of truth)

(b) The parental instinct is fitness-conferring because the resulting belief is true.

The Darwinian account (given naturalism) is overwhelmingly in favor of (a). And consider this gem from Darwin himself:

"If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering."

His suggestion is that, although any social animal that evolved higher intelligence (such as ours) and language would develop a sense of moral obligation or "conscience," the actual directives of that conscience would differ radically, depending upon the original circumstances of survival and reproductive success. And these, of course, depend in turn upon the radically contingent features of the evolutionary landscape (e.g., climate, scarcity or abundance, competing species, etc., etc.).

The upshot is this. If you are a naturalist then, for you, Darwinism is pretty much the only game in town. Without it, yours is a worldview with little to no explanatory power. But Darwinism explains more than the advent of opposable thumbs and incisors. It also explains the basic profile of human psychology--including the fact that we have the sense of moral obligation or duty. But the resulting explanation actual explains away those duties ultimately as mere subjective impulses. Thus, naturalism and moral realism are at odds. If one is a naturalist, then one is not entitled to speak of the wrongness of rape or terrorism or anything else. Because all such talk must be taken by the naturalist to be a mere expression of his subjective sentiments.

I maintain that a theistic worldview puts us in a much better position to make sense of the objectivity of those moral beliefs that we all take to be true.

The word bigot means to show or be intolerant to others who are different than you. This is all that it means. It is commonly referenced in examples of racial or religious bigotry, but the base meaning only qualifies it as being intolerant of differences, not with the specific examples you have given.
Certainly there are bigots of race, creed, color and religion to name a few, but bigotry is not in and of itself an evil word. The common nomoclature might be, but the etiology is not.

For example, I am bigoted against people that quote definitions which unfairly change the context of the debate from one of an intellectual dialogue, to a sarcastic monologue. . . . actually I'm not at all bigoted against such comments, just amused.

Mr. Hobbs,

I apologize that you do not agree with my definition of the word bigot, but perhaps you should take up such opposition with George and Charles Merriam and Noah Webster.

I agree with you that it does depend on the dictionary. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a bigot as “a person who is obstinately and blindly attached to some creed, opinion, or party; unreasonably devoted to a system or party, and intolerant towards others.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines a bigot as “one who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.” Finally, Dictionary.com defines a bigot as “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.” These definitions are strictly denotations, and since you seem to be adamantly denying any past or present connotation of the word, I have fairly omitted such elaborations from the referenced definitions.

I also agree with your overall philosophical conclusion that bigotry is a disease, but must refute my using the study of such origins to unfairly change the context of the debate from an intellectual dialogue to a sarcastic monologue. Furthermore, I do not see how defining your self-applied label is in any way unfair, nor do I see how defining the word you so vehemently champion to describe yourself is out of context. I am just an advocate of applying words correctly, which requires knowing what the words you use actually mean. Therefore, the adverbs “obstinately”, “blindly”, “unreasonably”, “utterly”, and to a lesser extent, “strongly” used in the definitions above seem to be in contrast to your claim that the word simply means to be intolerant of others different than you. Perhaps you should have used “intolerant”, “narrow-minded”, or even “insular” if used in a poetic since.

Still, you claim that the word “bigot” is not in and of itself an evil word, and to be fair, the etymology of the word “bigot” is formally unknown. However, just to further amuse you, the word is believed to have first appeared in the 12th century romance of Girart de Roussillon as the proper name of a family (Bigot) from south of Gaul, which, as you referenced earlier, is totally innocuous. However, by the 17th century, it is believed that the word was adapted from the play; the word bigothi was offensively applied by the Franks to the Wisigothus (Visigoths) to mean either “detestable foreigner” or “foreign heretic”. It is surrendered that some modern Romantic scholars find phonetic difficulties making such a connection, and instead believe that the origin of the word is more likely born from the 12th century opprobrious label that the French gave the Normans (bigoz or bigos), which originated from a legend where in the 9th century, Hrolf (Rollo) the Duke of Normandy refused to kiss the foot of Charles the Simple, King of France and exclaimed “Ne se, bi got!” which meant “No, by God!”.

So while not explicitly evil, I still am perplexed as to why anyone would champion, let alone self-impose, a label with such a derogatory history. However, I can not and do not counter your self proclamation toward bigotry if you so insist.

Josh.

Some with race. Others with classes of people and on here the most obvious is political bigotry. There are of course many more forms to which I am bigoted toward. Which do you fit?

Rich I apologize I have not read your article sooner you know how busy I am. As far as all your points and views I can appreciate your trying to get into some interesting discussion with all your anonymous friends, like Muddle, Git Real, etc. However trying to push my buttons like wanting the GATORS to get there but kicked is way off the radar screen, and I know why you did it! I can't wait to take your C note after the GATORS prevail.

Dr Mathew J Autera

Unless the State is doing it.

So your comment about the bet is obviously in jest.

Now if you have the guts to give me the 3 points to cover the spread that you claim the Gators' have, then I might partake in your game of chance. But a C-note? What about a B-sharp?

God I hope you don't lose, otherwise I'm going to have to hear you sing, and I'm sure you can't hold a C-note very well.

Now about the 3 points I am supposed to give you NOT! What ever Vagas has is what we will do.

Rich you and I both know that nor myself, you or anyone else on this site would like to hear me sing we will not be bringing in any B sharps. We will just talk about the game and the C note you wanted to put down the first you knew we were playing. Well, maybe just for you I will sing when you hand me that note what ever letter you want it to be.

Now as for the spine there are 7 cervicals 12 thoracics, and 5 lumbars in the spine.

Dr Mathew Autera

And, if but kicked is way off the radar screen, where is he?
How many bones in a spine?