When we look at animal world from outside, it looks ruthless and cruel for anybody who watches animal planet. Just day before yesterday, I was at my friends place. All of us (me and his family) were watching animal world in the eve. We saw back to back two programs. One covered fight between two lion groups for terretory and second was about hunting sharks. All the eyes were stuck to the TV screen. Suddently my friends son shouted out "mom why did all those sharks target that small baby peguin? they were never bothered about the baby getting hurt by their teeth!!!". It was an innocent query. For sharks its was a feast, nice meal for the day, but for us, attacking animals or hunting them and getting them down to earth to eat it live is an immoral behaviour. Even after killing that small baby penguin, it was torn into pieces by other sharks and they literally fought for it (may be that is the way they share ;-)). This violent behaviour of animals can be justified by hunger and need of survival. Everybody wants to survive, and there's no exception.
The point that knocked my brain's door was, we also used to hunt in groups, we also killed smaller mammals to get food and shelter (by using their skin). But then, we developed farming and animal cultivation as an alternative for this field job. We changed with time and along came ethics and religion. We decided the code of conduct, some rules, laws and protocols to govern our society. Those who did not follow these, were punished by the tribe (sticking together as group is already discussed in "Parallel strategies" post earlier).
Our raw animal behavioural part is now masked by decent protocols decided by society, which was not the case earlier. Why suddenly did our species decide what is right and wrong?why some behaviour was considered as a shameful act for individuals in the society? How this behaviour fit into selfish gene theory?
First lets see what is morality.
Web definition of morality: Source Wikipedia;
"Morality can be defined as a system of ideas about right and wrong conduct."
Morals make individuals respect each other and as a resultant, creates a secured place for living. When we look at morals biologically, it is never an extra part of emotional intelligence that was imparted from somewhere outside, it is something which should have only helped better survival of the species in some or the other way. It did that as we can see today in case of humans. Morals are something which set constrains to individuals and make them act true. As being or acting right is always beneficial, this increases trust in the community. These are the set of ideas which seperate us from other organisms. It makes stable living possible as it reduces chaos. This social chaos can cause splitting of groups and individuals. As of now the dependancy of humans over each other has increased to such an extend that this splitting can be quite expensive for individuals (in terms of being alive). So on the whole morality increases the chance of survival of species.
From this we can conclude that morality helps humans in many ways and we followed it with a simple selfish motive of survival.
#Note: I want all the readers to take a note of this, that calling ourselves selfish need not be considered as depressive (again these are morals which make us rebound away from the idea of selfishness). This is the reason we exist in the universe, just to make our genes to propagate in future (rather they themselves make it happen). #
