Conference 3: Primate “Ethics” and Human Morality (November 10, 2012)

Dr. Daryl Domning, PhD, Howard University

Biologists have shown that the behavior of apes and other animals in the wild is strikingly like our own – much “good” behavior such as caregiving and sharing of food, but also very “bad” behavior.  Both promote survival, via natural selection. Because humans have evolved from them, we too have an innate tendency to commit selfish acts, which Christian theology attributed to the “original sin” of Adam and Eve.  This explained both moral evil and the physical evils of suffering and death. Our inheritance of this fault has seemed to require monogenism (descent of all humans from one couple), which the evidence of evolution and genetics has rendered scientifically untenable. Instead, evolution explains both physical evil and the human propensity to sin. The simple fact is that matter is made up of parts accounts for suffering and death – which in all cases are traceable to something physically coming apart, on the subatomic or some higher level. This includes the errors in copying DNA that constitute genetic mutations, which are mostly harmful – but which also provide the raw material of variation on which natural selection works. Without this special kind of “physical evil”, evolution could not have produced the diversity of life forms that the Creator pronounced “very good” (Genesis 1).

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Dr. Richard Potts, PhD, Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Paleoanthropological discoveries such as evidence concerning the evolution of social cohesion, altruistic care among individuals, the development of a complex symbolic universe involving imagination, abstraction, and cognitive development – especially over the past 300,000 years – offer valuable insights into the ancient background on which the human moral and spiritual sense has been built.  For example, fossils of Homo neanderthalensis, a species closely related to our own, indicate that the Neanderthals by around 60,000 years ago were capable of long-term care of individuals who lived for decades after experiencing injuries early in life. Although the oldest known symbolic burials (ca. 130,000 years old) are of Homo sapiens (at the site of Qafzeh, Israel), certain Neanderthal burials present provocative evidence of symbolic thought indicating long-term remembrance of individuals, if not a sense of an afterlife.

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Rev. Dr. Joseph F. Wimmer, O.S.A., STD, Washington Theological Union

The vivid story of Adam and Eve is seen today as an explanatory mythic narrative of the human condition characterized by the pains of childbirth, labor by the sweat of one’s brow, broken relationships between men and women, disordered desires, mortality, and sin. In spite of appearances, immortality is not something that humans lost but rather something they failed to attain. The task for Catholic theologians today is not to dismiss the doctrine of original sin but to make sense of it in light of the discoveries of evolution, while not denying the necessity of divine grace through Christ for everyone in order to attain eternal salvation.

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Rev. Kevin O’Neil, C.SS.R., S.T.D.

In faith we live anticipating the vision of the Book of Revelation chapter 21 where it tells us that in the end there will be no more tears, no more death, or mourning. Yet we live in a world marked by suffering, often due to harmful actions of humans toward one another and toward creation. In this paper I examine briefly the traditional distinction between moral evil and physical/ontic evil including insights from theories of evolution. Is moral evil as traditionally understood even possible?

Finally, what virtues might be particularly called for in this world of suffering? Might we see the hint of these virtues in certain behaviors in primates, behaviors which we name virtuous in the human community? What virtues, indeed, will move the universe towards a completion and fulfilment in Christ?

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