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Comment by rudrigu | Hacker News Reader

That is as valid as creationism. Please abstain from such worthless platitudinous statements.

His point is that people love to confirm their biases on subjects like this with "facts" about evolution, without much critical evaluation.

Arguements like this have long be used to support why women shouldnt work or vote because thats the "natural state".

Your argument amounts to an appeal to nature, and appeals to nature are suspect for two (immediate) reasons:

* Humans are capable of rational activity, and have no need to appeal to our development for moral justification.

* What happened in our development (that which was) has absolutely no bearing on what we ought to do based on what currently is. We have strong archaeological and anthropological evidence that early humans cannibalized and murdered each other, yet we intuitively understand that those acts do not justify contemporary ones.

Appeals to nature are suspect, appeals to the irrelevancy of nature are outright dishonest.

Nature is irrelevant in moral discussions, as are all variables that exist beyond the agent's control. Blame and approbation come from choice made by the agent, not for the agent.

Nature is useful for understanding why something amoral is the case (like sexual dimorphism), but does not and should not inform our understanding of what ought to be the case.

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