ON THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION: A RESPONSE TO LEE CRONK

Abstract. Issue is taken with Dawkins and Krebs’s (1978) concep-tion of communication as being by nature manipulative and with Cronk’s proposals concerning the evolution of morality, both of which are grounded in evolutionary biology. An alternative view, which recognizes that which humanity has in common with other species but which emphasizes humanity’s distinctiveness, is offered to account for religion and morality. Ktywordr: truth. evolution; falsehood; manipulation; morality; ritual; Any understanding of morality’s evolution must recognize what humans have in common with other living things. The binomial Homo sakiens, after all, or rather first of all, denotes a species of organisms no less animal than the creatures designated by Didelphis marsupialis or Mantis religiosa. Humans are as possessed of physio-logical needs and reproductive imperatives as opossums or praying mantises, but it is one thing to recognize humanity’s animal nature and another to agree that reference to it is sufficient to account for, or to understand, human phenomena, including morality, in full or in general. I do not wish to misrepresent the positions of Lee Cronk or others working within evolutionary biological paradigms, but that does seem to me to be what they are attempting to do. At the same time that we recognize what humanity has in common with all other species, we must recognize what distinguishes it from all of them and what, in distinguishing it, has changed the nature of evolution itself. The attempts of evolutionary biology to account for morality, both Lee Cronk’s proposals and those that he reviews and criticizes, fail, in my view, to give humanity’s distinctiveness its du