The Evolutionary Worldview, Part 1: Theories Matter
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
“To all who are reaching for an ethics for the whole world.”
That last quote is the dedication at the beginning of This View of Life, by David Sloan Wilson. I will use material from the book fairly often in this series of articles, and I cannot recommend the book enough. I think it’s one of the most important books I’ve read in recent years, right up there with Sapiens.
So what does it mean to craft an ethics for the whole world? It means building a morality that encompasses not just certain citizens of the United States, or the entire United States, or the West, or industrialized countries, or even every single human being — but a morality that includes the entire planet. How does one go about thinking about something like that?
One lesson from This View of Life is that we should start with evolutionary theory. So what is evolutionary theory, exactly? Well, let’s talk…
