Evolution cannot account for morality

[Anomalocaris]

I'm sure this has already been discussed thoroughly by now, but I'm going to be optimistic that I have something to offer on it that may be helpful. Welcome, by the way.

Evolution does not care about how we treat others. What we get pertaining to morality from evolution are some basic pro-social sentiments that are found in other social primates (our senses of blame, empathy, fairness, guilt, love, reciprocity, and shame come to mind), a capacity to reason out how to serve those instincts and the needs of ourselves and our society, and culture to transmit our morality to future generations.

The 'moral sentiments' don't give us morality, but they're very helpful in getting us to care about morality. When we're outraged by the way someone is treated, it's those sentiments coming into play. Then we work out the morality as a society, inspired by our sentiments and guided by our reason and experience. And there's a bit of natural selection at play, a society that gets morality really wrong will be at a disadvantage compared to a society that gets it better; for example a society where murder isn't punished or even discouraged is going to have a hard time competing with a society that tries to minimize their murders, rampant murder just imposes too many costs on a society that allows it.

Other animals have instincts, so I'm not following what about us having instincts doesn't make sense. Would you elaborate on that please? I would argue that our moral instincts are too mutable and subjective to have been imposed by an omniscient being.

You cant' have biological evolution without biology, but it may be accurate to say that abiogenesis involved some 'chemical evolution', that is, something that we wouldn't call life that could vary in such a way that natural selection could act on it. For example, we probably wouldn't call a self-replicating strand or RNA alive on its own, but once that existed, it would be selected on to be better at copying itself.

Evolution is what happens when you have hi-fidelity but imperfect replication, the success of which can be influenced by environmental factors. The phenomenon isn't confined to biology, for example there are computer programs that take advantage of this type of evolution to find solutions to problems (there are many slightly different variants of the initial program and the variants that are closest to the solution are selected for).

I would also contend that human technological development is at least an evolution adjacent process.  We have externalised our responses to enviornmental pressures to such a great extent as a species that our evolution can no longer be described as fully biological.

IMHO, self-awareness is the mental facility to create thought model of self as an entity that facilitates simulation of own action and more sophisticated prediction of their consequence in abstraction, in essence self awareness provide evolutionary advantage by facilitating the capacity to game out own behavior.

technology at its most basic level is the extension of this modeling capability that supported self-awareness to also cover objects with which the self can interact.

morality at its most basic level is the recognition the extension of our self-modeling capability to cover others people and animals with whom we can interact.

the concept of soul seems to me to the manifestation of the fact that our mental model of ourselves is not of such a high level of fidelity that it would always anticipate the model that supports self-awareness as coming to an end when the physical being that is the subject of the model comes to end.

basically, we tend to believe we have souls because our self awareness is not sufficiently fully self aware.