re: #634 Cato

But that ascent meant something. It meant that the rules are not the same for us. We do all sorts of things that would kill off lesser beings yet we thrive. We believe false myths and survive.

False myths bind communities, making them more robust and hence more likely to survive.

We invent ways to kill our competitors more efficiently, and we survive.

Killing your competitors - do I really have to explain how killing your competitors can give you an advantage in the struggle for survival?

We engage in killing our unborn young and fail to reproduce up to our ability and we flourish.

Surely you realise that the rate of abortion is vastly surpassed by the rate of healthy births?

We aid our wounded and infirm, to the point of each individual’s own sacrifice, and we endure.

Aiding our wounded and infirm - again do I have to explain how that might make a group of social beings more, not less effective in the struggle to survive? Individual sacrifice makes evolutionary sense too - see kin selection and group selection.

We go to battle believing in a cause that has no material substance, yet we advance.

While the reasons for going into battle may well be immaterial, the spoils of victory generally aren’t. We evolved brains that are capable of language and reason. As a result, humans are motivated by ideas as well as gene-driven instincts, and sometimes those ideas are bad ideas. In that respect, humans are different from animals - (although research is showing that that is a matter of degree too) but that is hardly a problem for evolutionary theory.