From The Economist To create life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine...

By Patricia Cohen from The New York Times. "The question is part of a classic test for creativity, a quality that scientists are trying for the first time to track in the brain. They hope to figure out precisely which biochemicals, electrical impulses and regions were used when, say, Picasso painted...

By William Saletan | Slate "Is it OK to impregnate a 60-year-old woman? Should old women have babies? Until recently, this wasn't an issue. Nature exhausted your egg supply, and that was it. But technology has surmounted that problem. Now you can get in vitro fertilization, donor eggs, and womb...

By Katherine Harmon | Scientific American "If love is said to come from the heart, what about hate? Along with music, religion, irony and a host of other complex concepts, researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hatred. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun...

By Edward O. Wilson from The Atlantic "ENTURIES of debate on the origin of ethics come down to this: Either ethical principles, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience, or they are human inventions. The distinction is more than an exercise for academic philosophers...

Considering morality from viewpoints other than philosophy is becoming more and more common. This article from The Economist describes a panel discussion focusing on what biology has to offer in the debate about morality. Source: The Economist "Whence morality? That is a question which has troubled...

This Washington Post editorial uses information from various fields to argue that moral virtue does not have its origins in religion. Source: The Washington Post A growing sector of world civilization is secular; that is, it emphasizes worldly rather than religious values. This is especially true of...

By Bernard G. Prusak Bioethicists often use the “nonidentity problem”—the idea that a child born with a disability would actually be a different child if she were born without the disability—to defend parents’ rights to have whatever children they want. After all, a child is not harmed by being brought...

By John A. Robertson Egg donation fills an important niche in American infertility practice. It helps women with ovarian failure, women over forty, and gay men to have children. It does so, to a large extent, because donors are paid for their services. Some people, however, are uncomfortable with paying...

By David B. Edelman and Anil K. Set "Despite anecdotal evidence suggesting conscious states in a variety of non-human animals, no systematic neuroscientific investigation of animal consciousness has yet been undertaken. We set forth a framework for such an investigation that incorporates integration...

Abstract: Coercion is a powerful means to enforce altruism and promote social cohesion in animal groups, but it requires the reliable identification of selfish individuals. Experiments in a desert ant provide the first direct proof that a single cuticular hydrocarbon elicits the policing of reproductive...

Abstract: Moral evolution theories have emphasized kinship, reciprocity, group selection, and equilibrium selection. Yet, moral virtues are also sexually attractive. Darwin suggested that sexual attractiveness may explain many aspects of human morality. This paper updates his argument by integrating...

Abstract: Marmoset monkeys devalue rewards requiring travel to acquire, but tamarin monkeys do not, despite the greater patience of marmosets when rewards are delayed in time. Such preference reversals, not predicted by standard economic theory, may reflect behavioral mechanisms adaptively specialized...

Abstract: Social animals are provisioned with prosocial orientations that operate to transcend self-interest. Morality , as used here, describes human versions of such orientations. We explore the evolutionary antecedents of morality in the context of emergentism, giving considerable attention to the...

Abstract: Kin-recognition systems have been hypothesized to exist in humans, and adaptively to regulate altruism and incest avoidance among close genetic kin. This latter function allows the architecture of the kin recognition system to be mapped by quantitatively matching individual variation in opposition...

Abstract: The ethical and moral behavior of Homo sapiens is no longer the exclusive domain of religion and philosophy because we recognize that such behavior affects the reproductive success of individuals within the species. We are a social species and therefore our survival is influenced by our capacity...

Abstract: To what degree has biology influenced and shaped the development of moral systems? One way to determine the extent to which human moral systems might be the product of natural selection is to explore behaviour in other species that is analogous and perhaps homologous to our own. Many non-human...