Humans

On the Relativity of Ethics, Evolution, and Behavior

by Albert Prins

How Did Humans Become What They Are Today?

Key idea: Humans evolved as a species whose survival is influenced by genetic drives, variation, reproduction, and social cooperation.

TREBLA: To understand how modern humans have become what they are today, we can follow the line of reasoning below. This line of thought is primarily based on evolutionary theory.

There may have been many different pathways through which human evolution took place. Different traits and behavioral tendencies arose through variation, and natural selection favored those that, under particular circumstances, contributed to survival and reproduction. Over many generations, this process shaped the humans we know today.

Here we must make a distinction between humans as individuals and humans as a species. The life of an individual is temporary, whereas the human lineage continues through successive generations. The species therefore persists longer than any individual.

The human species, however, is not a tangible entity. It is a biological category consisting of individual human beings who are continuously replaced through reproduction and death. The same applies to other species, both animals and plants.

There are several possibilities:

  1. Individuals may behave in ways that directly support the survival of the group.
  2. Individuals may primarily promote their own survival and reproduction, with group survival emerging partly as a consequence.
  3. A combination of both tendencies may occur, depending on circumstances.

Regarding the first possibility, if individuals were consistently to sacrifice themselves for the group, those individuals would often die before reproducing and would therefore contribute fewer genes to subsequent generations. Pure group-level self-sacrifice is therefore difficult to explain as the sole mechanism of evolutionary selection.

ALEX: So the species is actually more important than the individual?

TREBLA: Not necessarily. From an evolutionary perspective, selection operates through differences in survival and reproduction. Individual organisms that survive and reproduce can pass genetic variants to the next generation. Behaviors that benefit relatives or groups can also evolve when they indirectly contribute to the transmission of shared genes or improve the survival of individuals within a social environment.

A person's lifespan is limited, but reproduction provides a form of biological continuity beyond the individual. These processes are not conscious strategies designed by evolution. Evolution has no foresight or predetermined objective; traits become more common when, under particular conditions, they contribute to reproductive success.

ALEX: It seems that evolution therefore favors the transmission of genes, while selfishness and cooperation are not necessarily opposites.

TREBLA: Exactly. They can reinforce each other under certain circumstances. An individual benefits from surviving, finding a partner, raising offspring, and cooperating with others when cooperation increases the chances of survival and reproduction.

These tendencies may include:

ALEX: And what about variation between people?

TREBLA: Variation is essential to evolution. Individuals within a population differ from one another, and environmental circumstances change. When conditions change, some existing traits may become more advantageous than others. Individuals carrying such traits may, on average, leave more offspring.

Variation is therefore important for the adaptability of a population. A population in which all individuals were genetically and behaviorally identical could be highly vulnerable to a sudden change in circumstances. Genetic and behavioral diversity provides a broader range of characteristics on which natural selection can act.

A trait that appears optimal under current conditions does not necessarily remain advantageous when circumstances change. Evolution has no knowledge of future conditions, so variation allows different characteristics to remain present within a population, some of which may become advantageous when the environment changes.

This does not mean that evolution consciously “aims” to create diversity. Variation arises through processes such as mutation and genetic recombination, while natural selection changes the frequencies of traits over generations.

ALEX: I understand what you mean. So when a child is born, its behavior is influenced by innate tendencies, but experience with other children and adults also teaches it how to function within a group?

TREBLA: Yes. Human behavior develops through a complex interaction between biological predispositions, development, learning, experience, and social circumstances. Feelings of pleasure, discomfort, reward, and punishment can influence learning and behavior.

These experiences have biological foundations in the brain. Neurotransmitters such as dopamine play important roles in motivation, learning, reward prediction, and reinforcement. It would therefore be too simplistic to describe dopamine merely as a substance that creates happiness.

The Concept of Good or Bad

Key idea: Good and evil are human evaluations; natural systems themselves do not appear to make moral judgments.

As humans, we tend to judge events and actions as good or bad. We do this according to norms and values that are deeply influenced by our experiences, culture, social environment, and evolutionary history.

But if we adopt the neutral position discussed earlier, we must ask ourselves whether “good” and “bad” exist independently of observers, or whether they are concepts we use to evaluate reality from a particular perspective.

As Spinoza argued, nature cannot simply be judged according to human moral categories. What we call good or bad is partly shaped by our own values, needs, and perspectives. We may influence nature, but we should first become aware of how we interpret it.

To explore this question, it is useful to examine systems in which human morality plays no role.

The Migration of the Wildebeest

Key idea: In nature, processes such as predation, suffering, reproduction, and death can form part of ecological relationships without carrying an intrinsic moral judgment.

An impressive example of an ecosystem can be found in the annual migration of wildebeest across the Serengeti in Africa. Massive herds move from one region to another in search of fresh grass and water. This migration forms one of the most dynamic natural processes on Earth.

During this journey, the herds are constantly threatened by predators such as lions, hyenas, and crocodiles. From a human perspective, this can appear harsh or cruel: young animals become exhausted, calves are attacked, and many animals die along the way.

Yet a different picture emerges when we look beyond the individual animal and consider the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole.

The wildebeest consume large quantities of grass, while predators remove animals from the population. Their movements and grazing patterns interact with vegetation, water availability, predators, and other species.

Predation can therefore have ecological effects on populations and their behavior. Predators do not consciously regulate the ecosystem, but their presence can influence where and how grazing animals move and feed.

At the same time, wildebeest provide an important food source for predators. Through plants, energy and nutrients enter the bodies of herbivores and are subsequently transferred through the food web.

A continuous flow of energy and matter therefore connects plants, herbivores, predators, decomposers, and the physical environment.

For the ecosystem, these relationships form a functioning network of interactions. For an individual animal, however, the situation can be very different.

For a mother wildebeest losing her calf, or for a lioness unable to feed her cubs, suffering is anything but abstract. What may appear as ecological functioning at the systems level can represent pain, loss, and struggle at the individual level.

From this emerges an important distinction:

Concepts such as good, evil, beauty, and cruelty therefore depend partly on the perspective from which reality is evaluated.

This is compatible with Nietzsche's criticism of the idea of a universally given or absolute morality. Moral concepts can be understood as human interpretations shaped by culture, history, social relationships, and human needs.

When we extend this line of thought to human societies, an uncomfortable yet interesting question emerges. Human civilizations also depend on interactions between population, food supply, energy consumption, resources, technology, and ecological conditions.

In the modern world, these relationships are under increasing pressure. Technological development has allowed humanity to overcome many natural limitations, but it has also increased the scale at which humans affect ecosystems.

The question therefore arises whether humanity will be capable of deliberately adapting its behavior to changing circumstances, or whether external disruptions will eventually force such changes.

Nature itself does not appear to possess a moral judgment system. Natural processes simply occur according to physical, chemical, and biological relationships. Whether a particular outcome is desirable or undesirable is an evaluation made by organisms such as ourselves.

Pandemic and Diversity

A World in Turmoil

In 2019–2020, the COVID-19 pandemic developed into a global crisis. Countries faced an unfamiliar infectious disease and had to make decisions under conditions of considerable uncertainty.

There was initially no vaccine, no established treatment strategy, and no complete playbook for dealing with the new virus. Governments therefore adopted different approaches.

Some countries imposed extensive restrictions, while others followed more open strategies. The result was a mosaic of responses rather than one globally coordinated approach.

Unity or Diversity of Approach?

A centralized and coordinated approach has the advantage of consistency. But if the chosen approach is wrong, the consequences can be widespread.

A more decentralized approach can also be interpreted as a form of experimentation: different societies adopt different measures and subsequently provide evidence about their consequences.

Only afterward can we evaluate which approaches were more effective. During the crisis itself, however, decisions had to be made without the benefit of hindsight.

This illustrates an idea discussed earlier: systems contain multiple levels. A decision that may appear beneficial from one perspective can have different consequences from another.

Variation in responses can therefore provide information and alternative strategies, even though variation itself does not guarantee that any particular strategy will be successful.

The Vaccine and the Unexpected Opponents

When vaccines were developed, they became an important tool for reducing the risks associated with COVID-19. At the same time, a significant number of people were hesitant or unwilling to be vaccinated.

The reasons varied. Some people were concerned about safety, some distrusted institutions, and others were influenced by misinformation, conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, or personal principles.

From a public-health perspective, vaccine hesitancy can create difficulties when high vaccination coverage is important for reducing transmission and severe disease.

The Evolutionary Logic Behind Variation

The broader evolutionary lesson, however, concerns variation rather than vaccination itself.

Evolution does not produce populations in which every individual is identical. Variation provides a population with a range of characteristics, and changing environmental conditions can alter which characteristics are advantageous.

This principle can be summarized metaphorically as: never put all your eggs in one basket.

The point is not that resistance to vaccination is inherently beneficial. Rather, it illustrates the broader evolutionary importance of variation and the fact that no individual strategy is guaranteed to remain optimal under all possible future conditions.

We must nevertheless be careful with this argument. The fact that a behavior might be useful under a particular set of circumstances does not mean that the behavior evolved for that purpose, or that it is useful under present circumstances.

This also explains why attempts to make an entire population perfectly optimized for one specific environment can create vulnerability if that environment changes.

Good and Evil as Human Constructs

This brings us to a deeper question: how should we morally evaluate people who make different choices from ourselves?

From a scientific perspective, we can evaluate whether a particular action is effective or ineffective in achieving a particular outcome. A moral evaluation is something different.

This distinction is important. The factual correctness of a claim is one question; the possible function of behavioral variation within a population is another. Recognizing a possible function does not make a claim true, nor does it make a particular behavior beneficial.

Ethical judgments such as “good” and “evil” can be understood as human constructs that arise within particular cultural and social contexts. This does not mean that every action has the same consequences or that all moral judgments are equally reasonable.

Moral values can be contextual, pragmatic, and subject to change. What is regarded as acceptable in one historical or cultural setting may be rejected in another.

This does not change the scientific evidence concerning vaccines or infectious disease. It simply separates empirical questions about consequences from philosophical questions about value.

The Paradox of Equality, and the Power of Difference

There is another dimension relevant here, which we will discuss in more detail later: the relationship between equality and difference.

Human societies often strive for greater equality, consensus, and unity. These aims can be valuable. At the same time, many physical processes depend on differences or gradients.

Two barrels filled to exactly the same level do not produce a pressure-driven flow between them. Wind is associated with differences in atmospheric pressure. Rivers flow because of differences in gravitational potential. Biological systems depend on gradients of energy and chemical concentrations.

These physical examples should not be interpreted as proving that social inequality is necessary or desirable. The analogy is useful only as a metaphor for the role that differences can play in physical and biological processes.

As a metaphor, this principle can also be applied to human development, although human reality is obviously much more complex than a physical system.

Perhaps wisdom therefore lies not in eliminating every difference, but in recognizing which differences are harmful, which are useful, and how societies can pursue greater equality without eliminating the diversity that allows adaptation and creativity.

Conclusion: Humility in Judgment

The COVID pandemic confronted humanity with the limits of its knowledge. Decisions had to be made quickly, often without complete information.

What we can perhaps learn from such situations is that human behavior is shaped by many interacting mechanisms. Diversity in behavior, variation in responses, resistance to uniformity, learning, and adaptation are all part of human societies.

We should therefore be cautious when judging people who think differently from us. Understanding the mechanisms behind behavior does not require us to approve of every behavior, but it can help us distinguish explanation from moral condemnation.

These insights bring us to a next question: where do our moral frameworks actually come from?

The Emergence of Ethics and Religion

Key idea: Ethics and religion can be understood as cultural systems that provide structure, meaning, and mechanisms for social cooperation.

We now examine the influence of religion on the formation of ethics and moral values. Some people argue that religion is the foundation of morality and that without religion societies could not establish meaningful moral rules.

Plato (427–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) lived long before Christianity. Aristotle wrote extensively about ethics and virtue, developing a philosophical account of human flourishing that did not depend on Christian doctrine.

Later, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) studied Aristotle and incorporated elements of Aristotelian philosophy into Christian theology.

Plato frequently referred to gods, but Greek mythology itself portrayed gods with both admirable and undesirable characteristics. This raises the philosophical question of how human beings determine what is good or bad when even the gods are interpreted through human concepts.

Confucius (551–479 BC) also developed ethical ideas without relying on Christian theology. His teachings contain principles concerning reciprocity, social responsibility, and appropriate conduct that resemble ideas found in many other moral traditions.

These examples suggest that moral reflection is not necessarily dependent on one particular religion. Humans appear capable of developing ethical systems within very different cultural and philosophical frameworks.

Religion can nevertheless play an important reinforcing role:

But this does not by itself establish that religion is the original source of morality.

ALEX: Many people believe that God created the world and humanity. They see evolution as conflicting with creation. What is your view on this, Trebla?

TREBLA: If one assumes the existence of a creator, it is logically possible to interpret evolution as part of the mechanism through which creation occurred. But this is a theological interpretation rather than an empirical conclusion of evolutionary biology.

From a scientific perspective, the question of whether a deity exists lies outside what evolutionary theory itself can establish.

David Hume argued in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) that beliefs should be proportioned to evidence. The more extraordinary a claim, the stronger the evidence required to justify belief in it.

Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) identified God with Nature in his philosophical system. His conception of God differs substantially from the traditional idea of a personal deity who intervenes in human affairs.

The distinction is important because the word “God” carries many different meanings in different philosophical and religious traditions. Using the same word for fundamentally different concepts can easily lead to confusion.

ALEX: Why do so many people still need religion?

TREBLA: Perhaps because human beings struggle with uncertainty and the unknown. Where knowledge is lacking, people naturally seek explanations.

Thunder and lightning provide a historical example. Different cultures independently associated these phenomena with powerful deities: Thor among the Norse, Zeus among the Greeks, and Jupiter among the Romans. Today, electrical discharges in the atmosphere provide a physical explanation that does not require divine intervention.

The same applies to many other natural phenomena that were historically attributed to supernatural causes. As scientific knowledge expanded, natural explanations replaced many earlier supernatural explanations.

This pattern is sometimes described as the “God of the gaps”: the idea that divine explanations are invoked where natural explanations are not yet known.

Religion, however, cannot simply be reduced to explanations of natural phenomena. For many people it also provides community, identity, moral structure, ritual, and meaning.

ALEX: I understand your point. If the nature and intentions of a deity cannot be established empirically, then perhaps we should be cautious about using religious claims as objective explanations of the natural world.

TREBLA: Yes. But that does not require us to dismiss the personal or cultural meaning that religion can have for people. It simply means that philosophical or theological claims should not automatically be treated as empirical facts.

TREBLA: As for ethics and morality, I consider these to be human constructs in the sense developed throughout this book: we formulate the concepts and rules by which we evaluate behavior. Whether universal moral values exist beyond these human frameworks remains a philosophical question that cannot be answered by empirical evidence alone.

Different groups establish different norms and values. These systems can change over time and can differ substantially between cultures.

Driving on the left or right side of the road provides a simple example. Neither side is inherently morally good or bad; the agreement is useful because it enables coordinated behavior.

More complex moral rules work differently, but the example illustrates how conventions can emerge because they make cooperation possible.

ALEX: So religion is a kind of tool?

TREBLA: It can function as a tool for creating order, identity, cohesion, and meaning. But religious traditions are also complex cultural systems and cannot be reduced to a single function.

If ethics and religion are understood in this way, we must be careful not to treat one particular cultural moral framework as automatically universal.

Ethics can instead be viewed, at least in part, as a system of norms and agreements that makes cooperation possible within a society. These systems are influenced by biology, culture, history, institutions, and individual experience.

And this brings us to the next step in our exploration: Is that contract primarily focused on the individual, or on the group?