The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule

This book, like all books by Shermer I’ve read, is a must-read for those of us who have questions that aren’t being answered by spirituality, religion, and pseudoscience. It explains from a scientific and evolutionary perspective some of the reasons we do the good, and bad, things we do. Highly recommended, as are all Shermer’s books.

Like a majority of us, I was of the opinion that being religious is a necessary and required condition for being a moral person. (Mind you, I had that view even as I wasn't practicing the religious customs I was brought up to follow and -- by nothing more than my own self-admission -- living a clean and very moral existence for a decade without following any "rituals.") Not a second after I completed reading this book because it made me question that premise. Shermer's book provided a clear, if not complete, explanation for a moral living without the crutch of being a religious follower. Even if one is a follower, the understanding that morals are not necessarily bestowed to us on a bright and sunny afternoon by a creator but evolved in us -- if you must, by the creator -- as we ourselves evolved is a point worth acknowledging. Any reasonable person must look at the evidence as presented by Shermer, not just by itself, but as a first step, to make an informed decision on the affect of morals on us, and we, as humans, on morals. As for the creator himself, it suffices to say that Shermer is a self-professed agnostic. So, the choice would still be on our side even as we question if those morals were provided to us at an instance or inspired in us over years.

This book is one of the better books I've read. It might not contain much new, but it doesn't really need to. The ideas in here are too little understood. Just look at how straw-man after straw-man is made of people who try to develop ideas in this scientific way. Yes, Shermer's ideas might not be 'science'just because they are naturalistic. However, since science does exist and has the most evidence for it's ideas in general, to ignore science when developing ethical theories is to ignore a very important part of reality. So, even if the book is philosophy and devloping a 'metaphysics' instead of doing science in this book, the work still deserves credit for such an attempt. More books that take this approach, develop ideas on morality in this manner, and other subjects that have traditionally been dealt with by 'philosophy' would be a boon. Even if those books were to develop perspectives that were the opposite of Shermer's. The factual information concerning 'prayer' and how it has been shown (by believers and 'Brights') that something other than religion influences moral behavior is quite interesting.

Shermer's discussion of morality in this book is a continuation of that he started in How We Believe, though that book was less dry and more complete. Still, he bravely tackles morality with an approach not unlike Nietsche's (one must drop the crutch of religion and take responsibility for their own morals) only less angry and more scientific (hence the dryness). Shermer does do a fair job of trying to explain the beauty of individual moral responsibility, but the book concerns mainly the historical or 'evolutionary' explaination of morals, in that they serve a societal function. (A good companion book to this would be Sagan's Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors.)Shermer's lens seems greatly shaped by Darwin. That may be because one of his books between How We Believe and this on was In Darwin's Shadow (about Alfred Wallace), or perhaps Darwin's science is pretty solid stuff. At any rate, to apply a scientific approach to morality is to try and replace thousands of years of mythology which did the job until recently. Can morality be explained without religious ties? That's the interesting part of it.I was going to give this book 4 stars because of the slight disappointment I had with Shermer's writing style, but the topic is so vast and this book gives one of the best discussions of it I've seen in a long time. So it's a Fiver!

Can humans be moral without relying on some divine list of rights and wrongs? This book describes how morality could emerge from the need to optimize in-groups ("us") and coalesce in a common defense from out-groups ("them"). When we are seen as the descendents of hundreds of generations of hunter-gatherers, the idea is that certain lines of behavior might confer reproductive advantage, thus the genes motivating in-group cooperation and mutual defense towards common out-groups would prosper into the future. The rules of such cooperation and mutual altruism become codified into moral systems. A superb book.

In my own studies I have often come across those who believe, for there exists no other term, that religion and a belief in some supreme being are the root, the very foundation of moral behavior. As a student of evolutionary psychology, Ecclesiastical History and later of Divinity, I feel certain I can address this concept. It is, as history has proven time and again, simply incorrect. A better understanding of the Golden Rule as it has come to be known can be seen in Shermers latest book, as in the white papers of John Nash (especially Bargaining, Zero Sum Games and Economics), in the work of Charles Darwin, (most specifically his later ideas on an evolutionary ethics); the writings of Edward O. Wilson, (especially The Ants), and finaly with even a meager observation of nature itself. We do bargain, we do make social deals. This is observable in Chimpanzee groups, and so far as I know, they have no religion as we might recognize it. That we have to make golden rules, not out of a religious ideal but for the survival of our species seems obvious to anyone. Shermers time line indicates that morality and a social ethic were in development some 100,000 years ago. This seems about right, as ample social anthropological evidence indicates a turn toward large group hunting, and social coopertation far before this period. That some form of norm is required for an understanding of allowable and un-allowable actions within the group seems at most apparent from simian studies. This seems to me common sense, despite some reviewers inability to follow it. That a divine figure is necessary to explain morality, especially a very human-like human deity, seems to me silly at best. In the fine tradition of Darwin, Wallace, Dawkins and Sagan, Shermer points out that, which once read, seems obvious. Shermer, in the fashion of Carl Sagan, uses plain and simple concepts to explain the formation of a morality, not as a divine order, but as a aid to survival and social progress. The few issues I have with this book are more semantic than substance. I cannot scientifically, or in this case ?morally? argue with anything put forward in this excellent account the development of modern moral thinking. Clearly hunger motivates us to eat, and pair bonding (love),besides the obvious advantage for child rearing (seen in avian species as well as many Mammalian)motivates us to cooperative hunting. That some reviewers fail to agree with this straightforward page-turner perhaps speaks more to their own beliefs than the evidence put forth in Shermers book. Sinply put, another brilliant work from a brilliant modern thinker.