(December 12, 2010 at 11:47 am)Captain Scarlet Wrote: But it runs deeper than that, a more detailed sketch of human morality without the need for god can be seen in the contractairan model. It is by no means a full explanation, but is no worse than the god model and it is simpler in that it does not need to invoke a diety.
Exactly. Richard Dawkins in his 1970's landmark book The Selfish Gene introduced idea of "memes", discrete units of culture which can self-replicate and mutate just like genes, therefor they are transmitted vertically from parent to child.
This model is taken further by Malcolm Gladwell who stated that memes can also be translitted horizontally within a culture, thus acting like a a virus as well. "A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects."
Morality, as a cultural phenomenon, is a culmination of various memes, that replicate, mutate, are selected out and infect a culture. Memes change over time, thus morality changes over time as well.
