(February 17, 2014 at 1:33 am)rasetsu Wrote: Better adaptations yield cognitions that are more ardently sought, which drives the creation of more clones of the DNA that leads to organisms with more successful adaptations.
This.
But expanded in my worldview. I use the definition of life being a replicating system which focuses energy streams on itself to reduce its local entropy.
From:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life
Quote: [The] phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its basis in the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.Natural selection acts on these living systems at any level of complexity, from virus to full ecosystem/cultural memeplex. At each level value can be thought of as a measure of the efficacy of any characteristic to allow better replication for that living system. Value and morals in the human sense are simply those characteristics that we, as humans, recognize as applying to us.
Moral for a rhinovirus may be the ability to cause its host to sneeze more and thereby disseminate more virons to other hosts.
Moral for a protestant sect (the religion itself considered as a living organism) may be the ability of an adherent to maintain belief in the face of the cognitive dissonance brought about by obvious inconsistencies.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
