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简介：We have long wrestled with questions of right and wrong, but one field of human endeavor - science - has traditionally sought to maintain a dispassionate distance from such controversies. And yet as evolutionary psychologists, biochemists, and anthropologists have begun to unravel the motives of the human animal, they have instigated a search into the roots of morality and the evolution of our complex ethical systems. Science, it turns out, has a lot to tell us about good and evil. The psychologist and science historian Michael Shermer has written widely on the nature of belief, and The Science of Good and Evil is a provocative capstone to his work . In these pages, he explores an endlessly fascinating question : how and why did we make the leap from social primate to moral primate? As communities grew from bands and tribes to chiefdoms and states, Shermer explains, humans transformed the moral sentiments displayed in many primate species - shame and trust, for instance - into ethic
al principles. While gossip, shunning, and other informal methods might work effectively to curtail bad behavior in small groups, religion and formal ethical laws worked better in large ones. Our morals and ethics, then, are products not of a divine source, but of our biological heritage and our cultural history. Closing the artificial divide between morality and science, Shermer draws on a wide array of scientific evidence - ranging from the discovery of food sharing within vampire bat communities to the famous post-Holocaust psychological studies on obedience to authority and from recent anthropological fieldwork that proves our Paleolithic ancestors matched our modern propensity for warfare and ecological wreckage to research by neuroscientists on what is happening in the brain when we make moral decisions. He shows how game theory exposes the foundations of the Golden Rule, how chaos theory profoundly changes our perception of free will, and how fuzzy logic erodes the distinctions
between good and evil. And he explores how science can help us address some of today's most difficult moral dilemmas - including debates over abortion, pornography, cloning, and animal rights. Broad in scope, deep in analysis, and controversial to the core, Shermer's book shows how morality is deeply embedded in our being and behavior, and he develops a more universal, tolerant, and empircally based ethic that coculd serve all members of our species. The Science of Good and Evil is ultimately a profound look at the moral animal, the workings of belief, and the scientific pursuit of truth. - Dust jacket.
