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Evolutionary Ethics

American evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers believes that moral emotions are based on the principle of reciprocal altruism. His theory posits the different emotions have different reciprocal effects. Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom the help would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by making him want to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Finally, guilt prompts a cheater who is in danger of being found out, by making them want to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed. As well, guilty feelings encourage a cheater who has been caught to advertise or promise that he will behave better in the future.

To understand how evolution promotes ethics, we must consider the perspective not of the individual but of a gene. In particular, when organisms act altruistically, against their individual interests (in the sense of health, safety or personal reproduction) to help related organisms reproduce, can be explained as gene sets "helping" copies of themselves (or sequences with the same phenotypic effect) in other bodies to replicate. Interestingly, the "selfish" actions of genes lead to unselfish actions by organisms.

Interview with Tony the Tiger

Will LHC Kill us All?

You have probably heard rumblings about the sci-fi dangers of the Large Hadron Collider, but didn’t know what they were about. Well, let me break it down for you:

A strangelet is a hypothetical particle that has an up quark, a down quark, and a strange quark — or at least equal numbers of them in that ratio. The worry is that the LHC will create a strangelet in one of its experiments. If a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.

This doomsday scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.

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