Darwinism

Poul Anderson accepts a Darwinian account of human origins and shows human beings defending civilization. Does natural selection contradict civilized values? I think not.

I suggest that:

naturally selected limbs and organs perform biological functions without having been designed to do so;

we are naturally selected to help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return;

we experience the latter motivation as moral obligation, not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds like when expressed in merely biological terms;

we were unable to understand the biological basis of our psychology and morality until Darwin had identified natural selection as the mechanism of evolution;

also, human beings are essentially social, not solitary;

a species of solitary individuals would have been unable to develop language and thus would not have become human;

thus, our ancestors were social before they were human;

to be social is to have collective interests like, for human beings, speaking a common language and driving on the same side of the road;

such interests transcend a simplistic selfishness-altruism dichotomy;

human beings have survived and thrived by cooperating, not by going it alone;

cooperation is so fundamental to human activity that even the Nazis had to cooperate with each other in order to exterminate other groups;

thus, cooperation is more basic to humanity than conflict;

a society based on conflict without cooperation would not be a society - reductio ad absurdum.