The Biology of Moral Systems
(Foundations of Human Behavior) [Paperback]
Despite wide acceptance that the attributes of living creatures have appeared through a cumulative evolutionary process guided chiefly by natural selection, many human activities have seemed analytically inaccessible from such an approach. Morality, for example, has been described by prominent evolutionary biologists as contrary to the direction of biological evolution, and moral philosophers rarely regard evolution as relevant to their discussions.
This book adopts the argument that moral questions arise out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems are ways of using confluences of interest at lower levels of social organization to deal with conflicts of interest at higher levels. Moral systems are described as systems of indirect reciprocity: humans gain and lose socially (and reproductively) not only by direct transactions, but also by the reputations they gain from the everyday flow of social interactions.
The author develops a general theory of human interests, using senescence and effort theory from biology to help analyze the patterning of human lifetimes. He argues that the ultimate interests of humans are reproductive, and that the concept of morality has arisen within groups because of its contribution to unity, in the context, ultimately, of success in intergroup competition. He contends that morality is not easily relatable to universals, and he carries this argument into a discussion of what he calls the greatest of all moral problems, the nuclear arms race.
Pop's Story
A Midwestern Farm Boy's Memories of Times With His Father [Paperback]
The 1975 version of this book was titled simply "POP". Fifteen copies were Xeroxed and bound, and distributed among immediate family members. Included in it were 111 stories and 20 drawings. This expanded 2005 version adds four stories and seven drawings, and also includes 34 photographs, taken mostly between 1929 and 1953. Some stories have been expanded, others modified slightly; one poem was removed for modification, and use in a different publication. The current volume has been created because several members of my extended family have requested copies of "POP". Pop was Archie Dale Alexander, an Illinois farmer, and my father. He was born November 23, 1902, on a farm north of White Heath, Illinois, in Piatt County, Sangamon Township. My mother, Katharine Heath Alexander, was born and raised in the same township, only a mile and half away, just south of White Heath. After school they took up farming, moving in February of 1929 to the farm north of White Heath where I was born 9 months later, and remaining there until Pop died on June 10, 1953. Twenty-two years after Pop's death Mom asked me to write these stories, mainly for her grandchildren, none of whom was born soon enough to know Pop, Her request seemed to be just the right stimulus to release the flood of memories that follows.
Darwinism and Human Affairs [Paperback]
The great biologist G.C. Williams said that `natural selection, albeit stupid, is a story of unending arms races, slaughter and suffering. Its immorality has to be accepted and, at least, to be thought about'. R. Alexander thought about it, and more specifically how evolution can be used as an explanatory principle of human behaviour: selfish individuals maximizing survival by reproduction of their genes.