Brian Griffith's Blog - Posts Tagged "darwin"

According to classical evolutionary biology, animals do not evolve by learning from experience or by communicating, but only by random genetic mutation. Instead of seeking solutions and adapting to conditions as they go, they simply follow whatever their genetic programming tells them, and blindly undergo the results of death or survival. In this view of life, the question of consciousness in animals does not arise. Evolution does not involve development in awareness, but only in bodily function.
War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.
Charles Darwin