Evolutionary theory is threatening to many people - they assume that if evolution is true, then this undermines people's ability to value themselves and their accomplishments. In reality, evolution should probably help us to be thankful and happy for what we have achieved because we have managed to accomplish so much with so little.

The Economist argues:

Modern Darwinism's big breakthrough was the identification of the central role of trust in human evolution. People who are related collaborate on the basis of nepotism. It takes outrageous profit or provocation for someone to do down a relative with whom they share a lot of genes. Trust, though, allows the unrelated to collaborate, by keeping score of who does what when, and punishing cheats.

Very few animals can manage this. Indeed, outside the primates, only vampire bats have been shown to trust non-relatives routinely. (Well-fed bats will give some of the blood they have swallowed to hungry neighbours, but expect the favour to be returned when they are hungry and will deny favours to those who have cheated in the past.) The human mind, however, seems to have evolved the trick of being able to identify a large number of individuals and to keep score of its relations with them, detecting the dishonest or greedy and taking vengeance, even at some cost to itself. This process may even be—as Matt Ridley, who wrote for this newspaper a century and a half after Spencer, described it—the origin of virtue.

Humans developed complex moral systems in which all human beings, even strangers, are to be treated with dignity and equality. All of this, perhaps, is based on nothing more than an evolutionary need to treat friends well and strangers not so well because as social animals we need to do this in order to survive. The origins of human morality and ethics appear to be rather humble and unimpressive — and it hasn't even appeared in most animals — but the results have been quite impressive.

We humans have a tendency to develop far too much pride in ourselves than is warranted, but at the same time we should also avoid a tendency to dismiss who and what we are merely because of our humble and all-too-natural origins. We don't need to be the product of a supernatural god in order to value ourselves and what we do.

 

Read More:

• Evolution vs. Creationism
• Science vs. Religion