[braythwayt]

Certain things are so true they're tautological.

Science is observational. It doesn't give us rules we must follow, it describes the behaviour of things in the universe.

So if someone* says, "People do selfish things, that's science," true!

But if they also say, "Therefore, it's ok to kill your neighbour and take their house, see all of recorded history, colonialism, &c." I stop them. Science teaches us that people kill each other and take their land.

But science also teaches us that people coöperate and build rockets to Mars. Science is not prescriptive, and with respect to morality and ethics, science teaches us that there are many different strategies that people use to accomplish their goals, some of which may result in the replication of the information encoded in their genes.

Selfishness "Just is?" Yes.

Therefore "______ is ok and we must accept it?" No.

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* I am not putting these words in your mouth or arguing with you, just picking up where your statement left off.

[fit2rule]

Science has concluded that some human genotypes are, by scientific standards "lesser" than others. This can be - and has been - used by atheists and religionists alike to justify crimes against those people. Without a moral sense there is little holding back inhumanity from consuming itself. Science hasn't found a gene for morality, and doesn't seem to be on the hunt for it. So we therefore need our cultures to help us prevent calamity - which would require, by necessity, ignoring the scientists clamouring to explain from their pulpit that some humans are simply lesser than others, and "they have the science to prove it".

[braythwayt]

All I have to say about concluding that some genotypes are lesser by "scientific standards" can be summed up in the following HaHaOnlySerious joke that I have been telling my children from the time they could understand English:

"Humans are the greatest species of Life on Earth, according to all of the metrics that humans have chosen to measure greatness."

Science also tells me that insects are better than people, if I pick a different metric. I suspect we agree on this.

[joeberon]

“Science hasn't found a gene for morality”

No but the fact that we have morality (and the possibility that other animals do not) can be explained via evolution. In reality probably many genes contribute in a complicated way to making us social animals.