| I'm about as far from someone who understands this topic as it gets, but here's my explanation for why rape is bad that doesn't invoke god: It's not an evolutionarily stable strategy. [1] By that I mean, if we had a society where rape was normal, and sex was largely a nonconsensual thing, meaning there would be more violence, women would develop adaptations to prevent being raped, and more energy would be spent on the prevention of unwanted procreation, and the the gene pool would be less fit for survival than one without the rape gene. But merely having a society full of non-rapists isn't enough either: the first serial rapist to come along would invade the gene pool by raping others and spreading the gene that encodes this "rape others" behavior, and within so many generations the gene pool would be full of rapists. To have an ESS, our behavior would have to be encoded with a "don't rape others, but also don't tolerate others who do rape" strategy, which would increase a society's fitness for survival, and be more resilient against an invading strategy. Calling rape "immoral" is a good shorthand because "morals" are basically a formal way of defining the whole "don't do this, and don't tolerate others who do" concept in a way that humans can understand. But at the end of the day morals are just an abstraction that we've had to create in order to be more successful as a social species. Religion may have helped as well... to me these things are extended phenotypes for our genes that have been selected for over eons to keep our gene pool at a stable equilibrium. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy... |