The aim of this presentation is to discuss the relevance of biology to ethics. As a beginning, I will examine to what extent our morality depends on biological bases. There are two polar views about this question. One is moral nativism, according to which our morality is constituted by modules dedicated to that domain, and the development of those modules is biologically determined, although the acquisition of them is triggered by appropriate experience. The other is moral constructivism, according to which our morality is a byproduct of other biological capacities that are not themselves evolved for the acquisition of morality. The former classifies morality into human nature, while the latter classifies it into human inventions. This discrepancy between the two camps comes from not only disagreement about empirical claims but also different conceptual/theoretical frameworks. I will compare both positions and point out their defects respectively. In particular, I will show that constructivist defines morality too narrowly and thus artfully concludes that it is a uniquely human capacity. This artifice that constructivist (and many other) philosophers explicitly and implicitly employ leads to wrong conception of morality and underestimation of the biological contributions to morality. However, we should not assume from the beginning that there is fundamental difference between us and other social animals. As Darwin said, the difference is one of degree and not of kind. So, we should focus on animal (especially, primates) precursors to understand the intermediate steps by which our moral capacities have been gradually evolved. But why should we study moral evolution? The reason is that moral behaviors or judgments would be best understood as adaptive responses to social environment. (Of course, like other traits, they would be neutral or maladaptive in evolutionarily novel circumstances.) I want to show that this evolutionary perspective will prove useful to moral philosophers and settle the sterile nature-nurture debate. This project could be called "evolutionary ethics", but it does not mean "prescriptive evolutionary ethics" nor "evolutionary metaethics" here. (So, I do not intend to find in the evolutionary process the justification for any moral norms or judgments.) The purpose here is to demonstrate explanatory power of evolutionary theories and to defend the Darwinian method extensively.
Richard Owen's "On Parthenogenesis" was published a full decade before "The Origin" and a quarter of a century before the celebrated works on heredity by Jaeger, Nussbaum, and Weismann, among others. Owen presciently described the germ-soma distinction and alluded to concepts of altruism and cell-relatedness. In so doing, Owen not only examined a peculiar mode of generation in animals, but also ruminated on the relationships between germ, soma, heredity, and multicellularity. These are thoroughly modern ideas that continue to be debated today.
The probability concept is an integral part of evolutionary theory. What does the probability concept represent? If it represents the reality of biological world, then it means the world is probabilistic or indeterministic. In the classical world view, on the contrary, there has been thought that the probabilities appeared in the scientific context is interpreted as our ignorance of the deterministic world; i.e. they don't represent the real world. I survey these two opposite characterizations of evolutionary theory; one is based on quantum mechanical point of view and the other is based on Newtonian mechanical point of view. The former is realistic and the latter epistemic with respect to evolutionary theory. Then I indicate some similarities between them and criticize both characterizations. Next, I argue that full information or complete knowledge is not necessary for evolutionary theory. Information theory gives us a reasonable tool of inference on the basis of partial information, so I discuss the probability concept in evolutionary theory from information theoretical point of view. I show that the principle of information theory called, 'maximum entropy principle' can be applied to evolutionary theory, and make comparison between them. Then I argue that evolutionary theory can be interpreted as a part of information theory. Finally, I conclude that there is the mixture of realistic and epistemic factors in evolutionary theory and that the aim of evolutionary theory is rational explanation or prediction of phenomena based on partial information not complete description of it on the basis of full information.
In the late 1960s, Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta began to articulate what is now known as the neutral theory of molecular evolution. During the controversy that followed, Kimura became the chief advocate for neutral molecular evolution. In this paper, I will trace the history of Kimura's research on molecular evolution and assess its influence on biology. I will argue that the major impact of the neutral theory has been a methodological reversal that has displaced panselectionism as the starting point for research in molecular evolution.