Evolution and ethical thinking

Over the years I've been quite interested in how ideas of morality and ethics undermine the utilitarian notion of natural selection. The doctrine of natural selection is a cornerstone of Darwinian thinking. According to this model the various species evolved their differences largely through a process where advantageous attributes are preserved which improve chances of survival and reproduction. An ecological niche is found and the species evolves a strategy for exploiting it. Leaving for later the problem this raises of irreducible complexity (of what use is half a wing?) or exactly how the chemistry of a cell translates into physical structure, let's go to the question of behavior. At a deeper level than utilitarianism is the logical positivist view that "mind is an attribute of matter." By mind they mean behaviour. Living things have behaviours unlike inanimate matter. They have preferences, even at the most rudimentary level. Darwinians think this behaviour is determined by genetics. On the other hand I have thought for years that they had it backwards. Somehow, I don't claim to know how, I think that behaviour influences genetics. In other words, I think birds sing because they like to sing and that only as a side effect has that behaviour also become useful. Because for a small animal like a sparrow is it really so utilitarian to advertise its location to every predator within earshot? When Darwinians try to explain such things they become contortionists.
A sense of beauty and aesthetics in birds is rather hard to swallow for a logical positivist. They go through similar contortions trying to cram altruistic behaviour into the Darwinian box. We aren't the only species to practice altruistic behaviour but I'll only talk about human morality here.
As one of humanity's oldest documents, the Biblical narrative provides us with a record of an evolution in ethical thinking that spans 2000 years. You don't have to believe in god or Adam and Eve to be impressed by it. Critics point to various places in the bible that justify violence, such as Jehovah's injunction to kill every man, woman and child of the Canaanites but they miss the point. It is normal in all tribal societies to regard outsiders as non human. That's why the ten commandments given to Moses didn't apply to Canaanites. They didn't count. They weren't people in exactly the same way that Jews don't count to Muslims. Jews aren't human beings. They are children of apes and pigs. A Jew (or a Christian) can be beaten in the street with impunity by any Muslim. Greeks of ancient times thought that people who spoke other languages only made rude noises and could not be considered civilized. It's a well known fact that hunting and gathering societies only consider their own tribesmen to be human beings. I'm not very familiar with east or south Asian thinking on ethics and morality, but in the west a vast leap forward was made with the transition to Christianity. I don't mean to say that people instantly stopped murdering and torturing each other, but if they did it was contrary to the teaching of the Church. The early Christian thinkers spent a lot of time thinking about whether war could ever be justified when Jesus expressly stated that we were to love our enemies and turn the other cheek when injured instead of retaliating. There was nothing like this in Greek thought. The poet Archilochus (a soldier) probably formulated the standard Greek attitude when one of his poems told how if there was one thing he knew how to do it was to avenge a wrong done to him.
It's hard for modern westerners to imagine how callous we human beings can be to the suffering of others even in our own culture and not too far in the past. As recently as the beginning of the 19th Century people still gathered at Newgate in London to watch public executions. The method was hanging, but not using the technique of breaking the neck to assure a quick death. Instead the miscreant was hoisted into the air by his neck. Death came by slow strangulation. People from every level of society showed a strange fascination with the spectacle of life departing a living body. American cavalrymen on the western frontier got good and plastered before a fight because they dreaded what would happen if they were injured in battle and left to the Indians. It was usually the Indian women who prowled the battlefield and they liked to cut off certain parts of any soldier left alive. Any soldier brought back to camp by them knew that the Indians had developed a fine art out of inflicting a maximum amount of pain while keeping the victim hanging on to life by a thread.
These sorts of behaviours conform fairly well to the utilitarian model. Life is competitive. Fear and intimidation have 'survival value.' Of what use is turning the other cheek? If I were a Darwinist I would suggest that such behaviour, while of no advantage to the individual, is of benefit to the group. It would reduce internicine conflict and allow cooperation for the common good.
But the trajectory of ethical thinking, especially in the Christian tradition, is to confer equal humanhood on everybody regardless of race, language, social status or even species. It's a well known fact that people nowadays seem more shocked by cruelty to puppies than to humans. This kind of thinking has led to ideas of social equality, abolition of slavery, idealistic notions of the "noble savage," and now concern with the survival of frogs and toads. What makes all this possible is the human capacity for imagination, which I believe is also a prerequisite for religious faith. Imagination is the faculty humans have of picturing things that don't exist yet in the real world. It's not only necessary for religious faith but for invention of all sorts. Humans have been imagining for thousands of years what it would be like to fly like birds, to swim under the sea, to travel to the moon.
Similarly, when we humans imagine what it would be like to be that person on the cross, what it would be like to go hungry, what it would be like to be a fish on a hook, we put ourselves in that place and actually feel pain. resumably we have had this capacity ever since we became fully modern humans. But in the struggle for survival in a hunting and gathering technology it was not possible to accumulate sufficient surplus to assure life for any length of time. Agriculture improved things and provided enough surplus to sustain a small class of aristocrats. That was when record keeping, priesthoods, writen history, cities and a vastly more sophisticated organizational capacity developed. And it was precisely then and in the Middle East, Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, now called Iraq where this seemingly spontaneous combustion took place. And it is to this time that our bible traces its pedigree, and it is through that bible that we obtained a divine commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." By the time that the Romans put Christ to death on the cross the emphasis changed from being a law of god, to "Imagine what it would be like to die on a cross. Feel his pain. And he died for us out of love all the while forgiving his executioners."
I was thinking of this in connection with Islam. The god who spoke to Mohammed had nothing to say about forgiveness. And ever since Mohammeds followers took over the ancient source of our civilization it has ceased to be a factor in human progress. To mohammed there was only force and conformity. There was only the outsider who must convert or be killed. Sympathy for the foreigner and his ways was extirpated. Jews are only pigs and apes. In spite of what many writers try to tell us, wherever Islam went it inaugurated a dark age.