Evolutionary Origins of Morality :
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
Exciting Overview Of A Scientific Approach To Morality
Four principal papers and a total of 43 peer commentaries on the
evolutionary origins of morality. To what extent is human morality the
outcome of a continuous development from motives, emotions and social
behaviour found in nonhuman animals? Jerome Kagan, Hans Kummer,
Peter Railton and others discuss the first principal paper by primatologists
Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal. The second paper, by cultural
anthropologist Christopher Boehm, synthesizes social science and
biological evidence to support his theory of how our hominid ancestors
became moral. In the third paper philosopher Elliott Sober and evolutionary
biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that an evolutionary understanding of
human nature allows sacrifice for others and ultimate desires for anothers
good. Finally Brian Skyrms argues that game theory based on adaptive
dynamics must join the social scientist’s use of rational choice and
classical game theory to explain cooperation.

Personal Review: Evolutionary Origins of Morality : Cross-
Disciplinary Perspectives
There are two virtually undiscussed background assumptions to this
volume, which consists of four major papers, each with a set of ten or so
expert, cross-disciplinary, commentaries. The first is that there is a
characteristic human morality that is exhibited in almost all societies, from
the simplest hunter-gatherer society to the most complex high-tech market
society. The second is that one studies morality not by abstractly
theorizing on the basis of logic and intuition alone, has has been the habit
of philosophers, but by treating morality as a material force and studying it
scientifically as an evolutionary and structural phenomenon.The first
paper, by Jessca Flack and Frans de Waal, argues that some basic
elements of human morality are prefigured in primate behavior. The
second paper, by Chris Boehm, argues that the basis for our morality of
cooperation and punishment come from the evolutionary history of
humans in consciously egalitarian (though violent) foraging groups.The
third paper, by Eliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, argues that human
prosociality takes the form of evolutionary and psycholotical altruism that
developed through a process of group selection over the history of
hominid evolution.The final paper, by Brian Skyrmes, studies evolutionary
game theory, which underlies the arguments of each of the previous
papers, contrasting this form of game theory from its classical
counterpart.Perhaps I am biased, since I contributed two of the
commentaries, but I found the papers to be a fair reflection of the authors'
often extensive writings on the subject, and I found the commentaries to
be useful and at times extremely interesting in terms of their suggestions
for future research.This book is accessible to the general reader, while
offering lots of interesting material for the professional researcher.
For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price:
Evolutionary Origins of Morality : Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives 5 Star Customer
Reviews and Lowest Price!