Talk:Evolution of morality

Politics and morality

Couldn't the case be made that morality is fundamentally a political and public fact of society, and that an evolution of politics would typically mean an evolution of morality ? For instance, during the French Revolution, people started looting, cheering, rioting and dancing merely because a major political change had taken place. ADM (talk) 19:08, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't think Wikipedia is the place for "making cases", especially not if they are based upon ones own interpretation of some reported behaviour. People also start cheering and dancing if their national football team wins a match, and start rioting and looting if their local club lost a match.  Wikiklaas  17:48, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Law and morality

Brand new editor Rkrmoodle1212 (talk · contribs) boldly added a new section, "Evolution of Morality and Law", which I think is something that would be well to cover. However, that section did not really explain anything, and appeared to be primarily an attempt to boost one author, so I have reverted it. (There were also serious deficiencies with the citations.) If anyone wants to develop that topic I will be happy to provide some suggestions. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:54, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

The "Adaptive Valley of Disgust..." section is very hard to read and follow.

Can someone who understands this section please re-write this in a more accessble way? It's three long sentences with a load of clauses and arguments. As a lay person with no expertise this is shockingly hard to follow and needs the ideas broken out in a clearer way. The first sentence says

"Some evolutionary biologists and game theorists argue that since gradual evolutionary models of morality require incremental evolution of altruism in populations where egoism and cruelty initially reigned, any sense of occasional altruism from otherwise egoistic and cruel individuals being worse than consistent cruelty would have made evolution of morality impossible due to early stages of moral evolution being selected against by such sentiments causing the individuals with some morality to be treated worse than those with no morality."

That's a real ideas marathon! The especially hard bit is the bit about "any sense of occasional altruism... being worse than consistent cruelty would have made the evolution of morality impossible...". This is hard because the sentence is long so by the time we've reached the end of the subsequent bit, it's impossible to retain what the subject and object etc of this bit is, and how it relates to subjects and objects that pop at the end of the sentence, some distance further on.

It's a brain dump really, no one checked it for readablity or digestibility. Can it be updated? 51.187.63.42 (talk) 12:02, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Only human morality?

The introduction limits the scope of the article to HUMAN morality. And yet, large parts of the article are about the evolution of morality in non-humans. Should this be addressed? Joreberg (talk) 12:20, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

Explanation of "a recent framework" would be useful

The article states that "A recent framework integrates game theory, evolution, and learning to explain human moral behaviors without invoking group selection or a priori philosophical justifications". This is very relevant and important, and yet this recent framework is not named or explained, other than a link to an external source. This is a good opportunity for improvement of the article. Joreberg (talk) 12:25, 19 June 2026 (UTC)