ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin was fascinated by the possibility of explaining uniquely human traits by means of a theory of inheritance based on a "blind variation-and-selective-retention" model, but Darwin was unable to carry the analysis as far as he would have liked. This chapter suggests that there is more than consciences to the evolutionary conscience—especially after it has been defined in terms tailored to a natural historical explanation. From the perspective of moral origins, it discusses that the most interesting behavior of the ancestor was its capacity to sometimes gang up against very aggressive high-ranking individuals and punish them for their dominance. The moral-origins hypothesis suggests that an intensification of such social-control behavior was directly responsible for the evolution of the human conscience. With respect to group selection, Darwin's interests in conscience, morality, and sympathy-based altruism were so strong that he created a special, group level of natural selection theory to account for humans evolving an altruistic conscience.
