Right and Wrong

“Who doesn't know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin. Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals' feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality. Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. . . .

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from ones environment. " An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong, By NICHOLAS WADE, New York Times, October 31, 2006 J.J. says “This is a reasonable explanation of why we make charitable contributions to local causes when there are places in the world suffering from much more dire situations that we don't support. I've often wondered about this. On the other hand, when those far away places are given T.V. coverage that people see, they are more likely to aid those far away places. The same for concern about warfare in far off places like Iraq.”