RE: Morality in Nature
September 30, 2013 at 11:34 pm
(This post was last modified: September 30, 2013 at 11:36 pm by Lumpymunk.)
There was a really great documentary by NatGeo in 2008 about Stress called "Portrait of a Killer." Although the documentary wasn't directly about this it did show something that I think relates.
It describes how the life expectancy and general health problems increase as your place in the social order is lower, and the professor in the documentary studied a pack of apes over the course of 20 years to draw the correlation. One of the sections in the documentary described a situation where all of the dominant males in a pack were killed, leaving all of he mild-mannered socially calm males alive. This completely changes the dynamic in the pack from being hierarchic and dominance-driven to a much more peaceful coexistence.
What I think this teaches is that when you look to nature for morality a lot of it is not as "locked in stone" as you would think. The behavior isn't necessarily an expression of how the animal truly is (or would rather behave), but its adaptation to its environment... and can be easily changed. Within the span of a single generation the social dynamic was completely different in the pack... and was maintained.
It's a very good documentary (on netflix if you have it).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYG0ZuTv5rs
It describes how the life expectancy and general health problems increase as your place in the social order is lower, and the professor in the documentary studied a pack of apes over the course of 20 years to draw the correlation. One of the sections in the documentary described a situation where all of the dominant males in a pack were killed, leaving all of he mild-mannered socially calm males alive. This completely changes the dynamic in the pack from being hierarchic and dominance-driven to a much more peaceful coexistence.
What I think this teaches is that when you look to nature for morality a lot of it is not as "locked in stone" as you would think. The behavior isn't necessarily an expression of how the animal truly is (or would rather behave), but its adaptation to its environment... and can be easily changed. Within the span of a single generation the social dynamic was completely different in the pack... and was maintained.
It's a very good documentary (on netflix if you have it).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYG0ZuTv5rs
