It's very easy to speculate about the evolutionary origins of a trait, but often very difficult to defend such speculations with evidence. Natural selection is not the only engine of evolutionary change. So there's no particular reason to think that our capacity for aesthetic pleasure is an adaptation, rather than, say, a by-product of some other trait that is an adaptation, or a "spandrel" -- a feature that is the result of physical constraints on the structure or sub-structure of the organism. (Remember that in order for there to be natural selection, there has to be variation. If there's only one way that natural law permits a cognitive or affective structure to develop, then everyone would be the same.) There are also stochastic processes to consider: genetic drift, or founder effects (some desert-landscape lovers went and settled on an island, while all the desert-landscape haters suffered catastrophe on the mainland.) It's very difficult to figure out what kind of evidence or reasoning could really support one of the possible explanations over another, when we're talking about traits that may have evolved over 100,000 years ago without leaving any tangible signs of themselves.

Finally, in order to sensibly investigate the evolutionary history of a trait, you need a clear characterization of the trait. When we talk about "aesthetic appreciation" are we talking about the capacity to discern an aesthetic dimension at all? Or are we talking about the content of particular aesthetic judgments? The latter are so historically and interpersonally variable that I see no reason at all to think that they are adaptations. As for the former, I see no reason to think that our sensibilities are, as you put it, "grounded in non-aesthetic value." As you yourself note, there is no readily apparent correlation between things many of us find beautiful, and things that are useful in keeping ourselves alive.

All that said, you might want to look at Paul Rozin's work on the emotion of disgust (Psychology, University of Pennsylvania), and its relation to some human food preferences and aesthetic judgments. It's great stuff.

I'm with you. There is a security interest in having as complete as possible a database of DNA, but there is a contrary interest in privacy that I believe trumps the security interest. One reason for this is that, alas, your friends are simply wrong to think that simply because one is innocent one has nothing to fear from the government. Innocent people are convicted perhaps more often than your friends think. I recommend a book called Actual Innocence, which along with the Innocence Project explores how false convictions occur. One way they seem to occur is through the misuse of biological evidence. Or Google "Fred Zain" and "Ralph Erdmann" to learn more about the laboratory misconduct. The case of the Guilford Four in Britain is instructive, too. Sadly, the most prudent course and the course that best protects innocent people is not to allow the state access to the DNA of people charged but found to be innocent. This will, of course, in some cases diminish people's security; but the increase in security in the form of protection from the state's abuses compensates for that loss.

Both. General capacities and inclinations for thought, feeling, and conduct are biologically based (not just in our genes but in virtually all our tissues). But the specific way those capacities and inclinations are conceptualized and formulated in principle, narrative, argument, and prohibition shapes, limits, and cultivates them--often in different ways by different people and societies.

There is a number of issues raised here. Let me make just two points.

First, on the specific idea that "perhaps what we think is universally true is not, we’re simply programmed to think it is? ... that’d be a profoundly effective evolutionary tool for preservation of the species." But of course, if we were programmed to believe falsehoods, that would not in general promote survival. To get food, for example, we basically need true beliefs about where it is to be found.

Of course, this isn't to say that we need always get things right: it might be that evolution has provided us with quick-and-dirty information processing capacities that deliver true beliefs often enough to promote survival. But the point remains that what promotes survival is a sufficient number of true beliefs. So the thought that our beliefs are generated by mechanisms provided by our evolutionary history cannot by itself be a reason for across-the-board distrust.

Secondly and more generally, why should we suppose that our thoughts being the result of "physical processes" somehow makes them unreliable? I want my beliefs about what's around me to be generated e.g. via physical processes triggered by light hitting my retinas, etc., rather than to float causally free from my physical environment. Don't you?

An interesting question. Of course, our neuroscientist has learnt something about love, for she has learnt something about the neural causes of certain feelings bound up with love. But you might well feel that there is a sense in which her discoveries don't help us understand what really matters about love as part of human life (hasn't in the important sense learnt about the nature of love). That needs a quite different sort of enquiry, pursued by poets and playwrights and novelists down the ages. Compare: someone who tells us about the chemical composition of the pigments used in Botticelli's Primavera has told us something about the painting. But again such discoveries don't help us understand the painting in the way that matters, as a work of art, as part of the human world: understanding that requires something quite different from chemistry.

We could stop there. But perhaps there is a bit more that needs to be said. For there can remain a nagging feeling that the neuroscientist has in some sense diminished love, shown that it is "just chemistry". Yet is that right? Must finding out about various causes and correlates of mental states in some sense undermine them, unmask them as not what we thought them to be? Well, let's consider various other cases before turning back to love.

Start with beliefs. What causes me to believe that there's a computer screen in front of me right now? No doubt there is a long and complicated physical story to be told -- light emitted by the screen, affecting my eyes, rods and cones in the retina doing their stuff, signals going up the optic nerve, etc. etc. All very interesting -- and of course not at all worrying! To be told that such a belief is produced by a lot of causal processes of that kind doesn't in any way undermine the belief. On the contrary: I postively want my perceptual beliefs about the world to be caused by the appropriate functioning of my sensory apparatus as reliable generators of true beliefs.

But other beliefs might be caused in less desirable ways. Jack's religious beliefs, say, may be causally grounded in stories prevalent in the community he was brought up in, and be causally sustained e.g. by the emotional comfort they bring him in bonding him to that community. And when he comes to realize that, then this fact might indeed be worrying: for he might well think, on reflection, that those kinds of causal processes aren't particularly liable to produce true beliefs (given that the same sort of processes functioning in other religious communities produce quite different beliefs). In this case, the causal explanation might well be regarded us "unmasking" the belief, revealing it to be not in good order.

What about desires? Why do I desire chocolate, say. One account has it that there are chemicals in chocolate that in a mild way act rather like THC (the active ingredient of cannabis). Interesting if true. No wonder I like chocolate! And coming to believe this account which explains my desire doesn't do anything to diminish my desire, or unmask it as inappropriate.

With other desires, however, it can be different. Coming to recognize the cause of a desire can diminish it. If it dawns on me that I want SuperDuperExpensive Corn Flakes rather than ValueOwnBrand Flakes, not because they are better, but only because I've been manipulated by clever advertising, then my preferences have been "unmasked" and may well change as a consequence.

So like the belief case, coming to discover the causes of desires can leave them in place in certain cases, but might be undermining in other cases.

And now what about romantic love? If Mercutio whispers in Romeo's ear, "It's the serotonin, old chap", will that change his feelings for Juliet? Has his love been rudely unmasked, e.g. as just a desire for cheap chemical thrills?

I don't suppose Romeo is much in the mood to be distracted by such thoughts. But, waiting for Juliet's household to get to bed so he can climb up to her balcony, he might reflect how interesting the chemistry of love must be (and one day, when he has less pressing business to attend to, he must learn more about it). He also recalls his school-room reading of Book One of Plato's Republic, and the old man Cephalus calming accepting that "the pleasures of youth and love are fled away". But Romeo is only too glad that he is young, his chemical systems are bursting with vim and vigour, and his brain still gets awash with serotonin at the sight of a pretty girl. He is very happy, so to speak, to go with the chemical flow. So Romeo's feelings for Juliet aren't changed in the slightest by reflecting on their neural causes any more than my belief that there is a screen in front of me and my desire for chocolate are changed by reflecting on their causes. And he'll think that the fact that his feelings have a "chemical composition" no more shows that they are just chemistry (in any important sense) than our scientist showed that Primavera is just a load of old chemicals! His feelings have a role and place in his life that he values, and it is that which matters about them.

I'm with Romeo on this.

Depends, of course, on what you mean by "love". Some philosophers and cognitive scientists distinguish between the (neuro)physiology of emotions like love and the phenomenal experience of love; others say that "they" are really the same, perhaps merely experienced from different points of view.

If your neuroscientist is studying the phenomenal experience, then she has learned of a neurological correlate of at least one or two aspects of that experience. It's unlikely that she's learned how that neurological correlate gives rise to, or causes, the phenomenal experience, though some philosophers and cognitive scientists (such as the Churchlands) believe that eventually we'll cease talking in such terms (just as we no longer speak of diseases being caused by evil spirits).

There is a famous (or infamous) thought experiment that is relevant to your question, but that reverses the roles a bit. You seem to have in mind someone who already knows about the phenomenal experience (in this case, of love) and is learning about its neurophysiological correlate. The thought experiment concerns a scientist (Mary) who knows all the neurophysiological facts about color perception but has never experienced colors other than black and white. When she first experiences red, has she learned anything new?

For more on this, see:

# Jackson, Frank (1982), "Epiphenomenal Qualia", Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127-136.
# Jackson, Frank (1986), "What Mary Didn't Know", Journal of Philosophy 83: 291-295.
# Ludlow, P., Y. Nagasawa, & D. Stoljar (eds.) (2004), There's Something About Mary (MIT Press).

as well as a wonderful literary treatment in:

Lodge, David (2001), Thinks... (Viking).

My understanding of the supposed tautology to which you refer is this:

1. In the theory of evolution, only the most fit organisms survive.

2. But the fitness of an organism can only be determined by the fact that it survived.

3. So, we conclude: 'In the theory of evolution, only those that survive survive'

The statement in (3) is indeed quite meaningless. If this were indeed the basis of evolution, then it would have no predictive power, and fail a key test of being scientific. Because the primary object that evolution seeks to understand is the past through the fossil record (and similar evidence), and it is successful species that leave such traces, it is indeed the case the palaeontologists have to work backwards from survival to fitness.

There are several problems with the above reasoning, however. First, 'fitness' is not an attribute of an organism or of its genes. Rather, it is a relation of the heritable characteristics of an organism to its environment (including other organisms and also things like climate) insofar as this affects likely reproductive success. That it is relational creates problems for science, to be sure, since environments are enormously complex. But it does allow at least statistical predictions to be made, which can be tested. So, for example, the the various lists of endangered species are predictions concerns which species have declined in fitness. But these predictions are not entirely based upon extrapolations forward of a mere decline in numbers over recent years. Rather, at least some are based upon an evaluation of the likely impact of a changed environment (e.g. loss of habitat, climate change, pollutants, invasive species, etc.) upon an organism's reproductive prospects. Likewise, the concept of an 'evolutionary arms race' permits naturalists to predict where examples of reciprocal adaptation to new environments may have taken place, and thus test their hypotheses. Finally, consider the following: the fossil record indicates a mass-extinction event 65 million years ago; that is, on a global scale the fitness of most then-extant species declined rapidly. Only some world-wide change in the environment could account for this. This led scientists to hypothesise that an asteroid impact had been responsible. So, research projects were embarked upon to provide evidence for or against this hypothesis. Globally increased concentrations of iridium at the boundary layer and an impact crater of the correct size and date in Yucatan were discovered. Although still controversial, this impact theory is a dramatic example of the predictive power of the concept of fitness.

Second, survival of the fittest is by no means a complete picture. We also need to add in the idea of adaptation. By adaptation is meant that, by some process (e.g. mutation), new heritable traits emerge which increase or decrease fitness. This gives the whole account extra explanatory power, because it allows the fossil record to be organised according to the gradual descent of species. Likewise, it makes predictions, such as where in the descent 'missing links' are likely to be found (and often are) by future fossil hunters.

The above observations seem to show in various ways that 'fitness' does not simply mean 'did in fact survive', but rather carries both explanatory and predictive power, which is what the original objection hoped to discredit.

Because it didn't evolve in any other species.

That wasn't very helpful. More to the point, it may not even be true. For all we can say for sure, other hominid species (perhaps Neanderthal?) had language, but didn't survive. In any case, the question of just why a particular trait did or didn't show up more than once in evolutionary history may not have any clear or uniform answer.

The philosophical issue here, I suppose, might be whether the fact (if it is one) that as useful a trait as language only appeared in one species makes some sort of difficulty for the theory of evolution. Someone might claim: if the evolutionary picture really is correct, we would expect to see many species with this trait. Being neither a biologist nor a philosopher of biology, I can't say for sure. But I'm strongly inclined to suspect that this just isn't a good reading of evolutionary theory. Given the complexity of language-capable brains, what might be surprising is that the ability appeared even once. But it could also be that in a few eons, there will have been many species that developed some sort of linguistic capacity. Language has probably been around for a rather short amount of time from the evolutionary perspective. It's not clear why we would expect a relatively new biological trait to be more widely distributed than it is.

It's hard to give an all-purpose answer. But notice: the way you've posed the problem suggests that if cloning does more harm than good, it would be morally acceptable. People who think right and wrong are a matter of consequences would agree; people with a different way of thinking about right and wrong might not. Someone might argue, for instance, that trying to make copies of people shows a fundamental lack of respect for the humanity of the beings who result -- doesn't treat them as "ends in themselves." I'm not sure that would be a convincing argument, but it's easy to imagine it being made.

As to whether cloning people might have net benefits, the answer surely is that it would depend on a lot of other things, which is one reason why it's hard to give a blanket answer to your question.

About universal morality: while it's true that among cultures (as among individuals within any culture) there are variation in moral beliefs (as well as scientific beliefs), there are general (nearly universal, so far as I can tell) moral categories. One finds incest regulations, for example, in every society (though the boundaries of those prohibitions vary). Rules concerning possession, killing, and even, arguably, the sacred are more or less universal. I would be pretty reluctant to walk into any human society and start taking bites out of people's children. Moral beliefs and conduct do exhibit variation, but variation by itself doesn't disprove the existence of universal commonalities. Any pharmacist will tell you that different people respond to different drugs differently, but that doesn't refute the universal laws of chemistry.

Human moral life, then, exhibits both remarkable variation and remarkable commonality. As you say, there are various possible explanations for this. Philosophically, however, I think more naturalistic explanations (biological, sociological, etc.) preferable simply because they depend upon empirical and conceptual matters in a way that's likely to produce more agreement than religious explanations. Note that the existence of moral universals would not prove the existence of a deity any more than the existence of moral variation disprove deities' existence. And that's just the problem with matters divine. The deity's existence or non-existence is consistent with any empirical data. So far as human explanations go, then, it's better to stick to those for which conclusions can be reached on the basis of more or less objectively determinable observations and reasons.