Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Angrboda]

Maybe the Jays like eating maggots or flies. What do you think they were doing?

Clearly they do enjoy those things, otherwise I rather suspect they wouldn't bother. The point, however, is not that they went to investigate the dead bird but that they do it as a group, calling to each other such that everyone gets to eat rather than just one selfish individual as animals are supposed to be, at least according to those I've seen who hold that only humans are capable of such altruism. Note that there is no need for them to do this: they forage for food as a group, as this naturally gives them a greater chance of finding it. However, finding the dead bird means they have located a (potential) food source; it's in the best interests of the bird/s that found it to keep it to themselves. There is no requirement for the discoverer/s to tell the rest of the group. Yet they do.

Interesting. Thank you for the elaboration. I didn't get that nuance from the initial presentation.

It reminds me of work done with crows. Crows will "cache" food, putting it aside for future use, just like the human practice. However, quite frequently, a crow in possession of some morsel will "pretend" to cache the food item, but not really cache it until it has populated a few "fake" caches. There are certainly plenty of explanations which don't require the crow to be conscious of the effect of the behavior, but yet such behaviors can develop. At bottom, is there any fundamental difference between behaviors that mimic conscious behaviors and conscious behaviors themselves? After all, the conscious interpretation of the behavior presents a chicken and egg problem: which came first, the behavior, or the conscious representation of the behavior? It reminds me of Chomsky's linguistic theories concerning a Universal Grammar, that the rules of grammar as expressed in specific languages reflect an underlying Universal Grammar that is a part of the raw materials in the brain out of which language acquisition and specific language's grammars are formed. After positing the thesis, his acolytes broke into two schools, one that was pro-Chomsky and Universal Grammar, and those that disputed the existence of a Universal Grammar as a function of the brain's basic equipment. The other school or schools point to how the similarity of behaviors linguistically may have arisen because of various stochastic features of the language acquisition task itself, and that the appearance of an underlying unity among grammars does not itself reflect an underlying unification at the level of the brain.