Excerpt from "The Immorality of Morals and the Future of Amorality"
Most authors seem to promote one or the other of two functions for morality, internal cohesion and external threat. However morality served both equally well. In Darwinism, Dominance and Democracy by Somit and Peterson, the authors state, "Humans are social primates, closely (almost embarrassingly) akin genetically to the chimpanzees and only slightly less so to the gorillas. Working over at least 10 million years, natural selection has endowed the social primates with a predisposition (to understate the matter) for hierarchical social structures. That is, they invariably form groups, troops, tribes, and societies characterized by marked differences in individual status in terms of dominance and submission, command and obedience, and by unequal access to many of the good things of life. This form of morality then serves inclusive fitness; it is there for one reason, to improve the survivability of the tribe. SOMIT AND PETERSON later state, "Indoctrinability, then, together with dominance, hierarchy, and obedience, is one of the innate behavioral capacities and characteristics of our species. As might be expected, in most instances indoctrinability serves to support and reinforce these generally authoritarian tendencies. Under other and fairly special conditions, though, indoctrinability provides a window of opportunity for the acceptance of democratic ideas and of political actions that, if successful, lead to the establishment of a democratic polity." And later, "From a neo-Darwinian perspective, individual selection for indoctrinability in a language-capable species makes sound evolutionary sense. When individuals accept the same values, conflict and violence will be diminished, ...