by Mike Gray

Just in time! Darwinian psychologists are now absolving us of our sins:

In these heady post-modern days, it has become fashionable for Darwinian aficionados to ascribe human traits, both good and bad, to our alleged animal heritage. Of course, once God has been scrubbed from the picture of origins, everything is up for grabs—our aesthetic pleasures, highest aspirations, kindest gestures, and noblest actions are no more than a firing of neurons or the interactions of chemicals. This, claim the modernists, is a scientifically rational conclusion.

For instance, one recent undergraduate textbook purports to explain romantic love in this way: “It is true people choose their spouse because they loved him or her, but the likely reason that they have a propensity to fall in love … is because over thousands of generations, ancestors who had this emotional package left more offspring than those who did not.”

And don’t worry about telling lies; they serve an evolutionary need:

[O]nce absolutes are denied, lies are merely aberrations of the mind that help us mitigate our most destructive tendencies. “Lying gives us the temporary delusion that our personal and social worlds are intact, that we are loved [whatever that really means!], that we are safe … ” And while the author of the New Scientist article acknowledges that lying to ourselves and others may actually be damaging our brains, she offers the following advice to her readers: “In our personal, professional and collective social lives it looks as if we may have no choice but to confront uncertainty [by lying] if we are to survive—and survive well. So we will need to be very careful in future about choosing the situations in which we lie. All lies have networks of consequences we did not expect or intend.” In other words, ‘don’t worry yourself about whether it’s wrong to lie (it isn’t) but be careful lest you damage yourself in the process’!*

*Philip Bell, “Lying—A Survival Strategy?”, CMI.