Atheist? Agnostic? Curious?

Join the Central Ontario Humanist Association on Wednesday, February 25 at 7PM.
In honour of Darwin’s bicentenary Dr. Vincent di Norcia will present “Darwin: Ethics & God”. We meet in the Community Room on the second floor of Zehrs at Big Bay Point Road and Yonge Street. Admission is free for anyone interested.

Visit http://www.cohumanists.ca/ for details.

On Wednesday, February 25 we are celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809, a man who is on any account one of greatest intellectual and scientific minds since Newton. The aim of my talk will be to celebrate Darwin’s epochal scientific achievement, by describing his amazingly wide-ranging mind, his extraordinarily observant and meticulous scientific work in botany and zoology, his equally impressive achievement in developing the scientifically and socially revolutionary notion of the origin and evolution of species through natural selection, his still unacknowledged and equally innovative view of the intelligence and ethics, in animals as well as humans, and, last but not least, a Darwinian view of religion and God. Throughout I wish to communicate to everyone the grandeur and beauty of Darwin’s scientific achievement in ethics as well as evolution.

Dr. Vincent di Norcia provided us with some notes from his lecture.  You can read them here:

DARWIN on ETHICS

Vincent di Norcia PhD

Author, Hard like Water – Ethics in Business

Ethics, Sustainability and Communications Consulting

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Sudbury

vdn@sympatico.ca / www.dinorcia.net

© Vincent di Norcia 2009

It seems to me highly probable–namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers become …nearly as well developed, as in man.

Charles Darwin. The Descent of Man. 1871.

Today we celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809, a man who is on any account one of greatest scientists since Newton. In this talk I wish to describe Darwin’s wide-ranging mind, his extraordinarily observant and meticulous scientific work in geology, botany, and biology, and his still revolutionary hypothesis about ‘the moral sense.’ Darwin is deservedly renown for his epochal achievement in developing the revolutionary notion of the origin and evolution of species through natural selection and environmental adaptation (which, he showed, is not explicable by sexual selection). It rests on two key probabilities, that of the original emergence of a species and of its ultimate survival, both of which directly reflect its fitness to its environmental habitat. The work of both Mendel and now Watson and Crick have shown that genes are the underlying biological mechanism in evolution, for which Darwin himself was searching.

What still is less noticed is that survival, wellbeing and reproduction are natural values evident in the evolutionary variation and adaptation of species to their environments, or natural selection. They would appear to constitute, many think, a natural foundation for morality. This insight underlies Darwin’s equally revolutionary hypothesis about the evolutionary emergence of the moral sense. It is, he felt, ‘aboriginally derived’ from ‘social instincts’ of humans and other intelligent animals, and is ‘fundamentally identical’ to them, especially primates, as indicated in the above quotation. The main value driving the moral sense, he added, is the good of the community, or the utilitarian notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number (probably based on his reading of J. S. Mill). Also, the moral sense was reinforced by the need to ensure, and enforce social peace in the community. Thus, he wrote, ‘social virtues’ are more important than self-regarding virtues. A major problem he posed was how groups extended their moral code beyond their tribe and kin. In reply he suggested that Golden Rule was key, in effect recognizing other intelligent animals as similar to oneself.

While neuroscience and socio-biology and other work has proven Darwin right about the instinctual basis of our social being, and our intellectual powers or ‘multiple intelligences’, Darwin’s social view of ethics represents an early stage in developing a scientific understanding of ethics. It has been independently supported by Kropotkin’s work on cooperation in evolution, Piaget’s findings on cooperation in early childhood moral development, the multiple neural correlates of both social and moral intelligence as shown by Damasio, Casebeer and others, the fundamental importance of communication and language, of mutually beneficial exchange and trade, as shown by Boulding and Ridley, and, of course the work of many others. Largely unnoticed however is To the extent to which Darwin’s and their work has totally undermined mainstream moral philosophy and psychology (as found in say, Kant and Kohlberg), which still assumes that morality is primarily a matter of individual values, feelings, choices, reasoning, and other subjective mental operations. A variety of questions remain, concerning the complex interconnections between morality and social life and individual psychology, not to forget socio-biology and neuroethics. Nothing in Darwin’s work proves, or disproves, the existence of gods. Darwin’s ethics however still is largely ignored or ignorantly opposed in mainstream moral theory—whose abhorrence of his scientific approach to ethics now approaches ideological, if not implicitly creationistic, levels of self-delusion.

But the fact clearly remains that in both the matters of natural history and ethics, Charles Darwin’s work to this day represents a ground-breaking intellectual and scientific achievement. What he wrote on natural selection at the end of the Origin of Species, to my mind can also be said about his view of ethics in the Descent of Man:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers. Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and still are being evolved.

RELEVANT READINGS

DARWIN’S WORKS

The Voyage of Beagle. 1839.

The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. 1842

*On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 1859  (Washington Square Press, NYC 1970)

The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. 1868

*The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 1871

*The Expression of the Emotions in Humans and Animals. 1875

The Power of Movement in Plants\. 1875, revised 1880

The Different forms of Flowers on Plants of the same species 1876, revised 1877

The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms. 1881

WORKS ON ETHICS & RELATED SUBJECTS

Janet Browne. 1995. Charles Darwin. 2 vols.

William Casebeer. 2003. Natural Ethical Facts.

Antonio Damasio. 1994. Descartes’ Error.

Richard Dawkins. 1986. The Selfish Gene. & 1992. The Blind Watchmaker.

Daniel Dennett. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Frans De Waal. 1996. Good Natured-the Origins of Right & Wrong in Animals.

Theodosius Dobzhansky. 1963. Evolution, Genetics and Man. 1962. Mankind Evolving.

Vincent di Norcia. 2009. Darwin on Moral Intelligence. Philosophy Now. Jan.-Feb.

Vincent di Norcia. 1998. Hard Like Water – Ethics In Business.

Howard Gardner. 2006. Multiple Intelligences – New Horizons.

Richard Leakey. 1992. Origins Reconsidered.

James Lovelock. 1979. Gaia.

Mary Midgley. 1994. The Ethical Primate.

Matt Ridley. 1997. The Origin of Virtue.

Michael Ruse. 1986. Taking Darwin Seriously.

Niall Shanks. 2006. God, the Devil, and Darwin.

Michael Shermer. 2004. The Science of Good and Evil.

George G. Simpson. 1949. This View of Life.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 1964. The Phenomenon of Man.

Robert S. Trivers. 2002. Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers.

Edumund O. Wilson. 1992. The Diversity of Life. 2000. Socio-Biology – The New Synthesis. & 1978. On Human Nature.

Robert Wright. 1995. The Moral Animal.