Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, while bad behaviour exists because
violence, cheating and aggression had survival value during the early evolution of
humans, just as it did for other animals.
The Naturalistic Origins of Moral Values
Many people derive their moral values from their religious beliefs. The creationists
prominent in the USA reject evolution partly because they fear that acceptance of
the evolutionary origin of humans will undermine the basis for morality and lead
to social breakdown. They think that if the idea that humans are just another sort of
animal becomes widely accepted, it will lead to an increase in violence and disorder.
What little evidence there is in the peer-reviewed literature does not tend to support
this view, and I will now discuss this evidence as an example of how scientists, in
this case social scientists, try to understand the world.
In 2005, a freelance palaeontologist called Gregory Paul published a paper in
the electronic peer-reviewed
Journal of Religion and Society,
which is freely avail-
able online. This paper compares the incidence of various indicators of the moral
state of a society, such as homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, teenage
pregnancy and abortion, and the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, with
the incidence of religious belief and acceptance of human evolution in eighteen
prosperous democracies of the world for which extensive data are available. This
comparison showed a negative correlation between the acceptance of human evo-
lution and the degree of religious belief. Thus the least religious nation of those
surveyed, Japan, shows the highest acceptance of human evolution, while the lowest
level of acceptance is found in the most religious developed democracy, the USA.
These correlations support the view of creationists that religious belief tends to
lead to the rejection of belief in human evolution, but their further conclusion that
therefore the latter leads to a less moral society is contradicted by the data on the
incidence of the indicators of low moral standards listed above. All these indica-
tors correlate positively with religious belief, the leader being the USA, which has
the highest rates of homicide, early mortality, teenage pregnancy and abortion, and
sexually transmitted infection rates in the developed world. The most successful
countries by these indicators are the secular democracies, France, Scandanavia and
Japan. Some of these correlations are illustrated in Fig. 2.11.
Correlations must be interpreted with great caution because the observation that
two phenomena are correlated with each other does not necessarily mean that one
causes the other. For example, important causal factors in the high rate of homicide
in the USA are likely to be the easy availability of firearms and the wide disparities
in wealth between different groups of people. Gregory Paul himself cautions in the
Introduction to his paper that “This is not an attempt to present a definitive study that
establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health. It
is hoped that these original correlations and results will spark further research and
debate on the issue”.
