(credit: Sgt. Sinthia Rosario, via Wikimedia Commons 

But if humans act as they do mostly because of social programming, why or how did some behaviour patterns ever become established in the first place in the earliest of human societies? And why did many behaviours obviously possible for humans vanish totally or never get tried at all? Why don’t most people on this planet eat Rowan berries or make their children into slaves? The answer is obvious: the morés that help us to live are kept; the ones that don’t serve the needs of survival aren’t. We keep alive the morés that keep us alive.

                                                   

The second step in the explanation of social morés and cultures is this: behaviour patterns become established in a society and passed on from generation to generation if they enable the people who do them to live their lives as individuals and as whole tribes , to reproduce, and to program the behaviours into their young. If new morés or behaviour patterns are to last, they must achieve these results at levels of efficiency at least as high as those the community knew before its people began to acquire the new behaviour patterns. This is the theory around which is built the field of sociocultural evolution, a field of study that began to develop as a branch of Science only in the twentieth century due to the work of people like sociologist Gerhard Lenski and anthropologists Leslie White and Marshall Sahlins.³

And none of the socio-biologists has come up with a comprehensive theory of socio-cultural evolution, one that is widely accepted as correct in the way that Darwin’s theory of biological evolution is. But at least they are on the right track. Their project is the right project. They are trying to understand morality in terms of reality, and so to make the connection we desperately need. Why do we do the things that we do? What things should we be doing? 

   

                                      Marshall Sahlins (credit: Elkziz, via Wikimedia Commons)