Rarely are the skills of public speaking put to greater test than when a job is on the line. In a professional interview, which may include a “job talk,” the judges scrutinize the presentation carefully. And the interview questions, which can come at any time, are often the most consequential part of the entire process.

Whether one's career progresses into research, academia or the private sector, the real agenda of the interview is usually below the surface.

It is an accomplishment just to make it to the interview stage. But the frustrating truth is that there is little peace in being short-listed for a job. At this late stage of the interview process, the job panel has evaluated personal statements, letters of recommendation, school transcripts, test scores, and job experience, among other criteria. Yet these factors alone are an insufficient basis for making a final selection. What tips the scales is the information the candidate provides in the interview itself.

What They Will Ask

As much as a candidate would like to divine what the judges think is a “good fit,” she can never truly know. The first impressions of the judges are completely out of her control. Surprise questions will always arise.

We have witnessed hundreds of speakers both present more clearly and feel more confident when they follow the preceding guidelines. Good speakers all have similar traits. They draw a connection between their scientific work and the work of the audience. They introduce concepts and definitions before focusing on the more detailed aspects of the talk. Like effective teachers, good speakers logically present the data, and the thoughts behind the data, so that the audience learns the entire scientific process. Good speakers have a main theme, which is followed throughout the presentation and is encapsulated in a brief and memorable statement near the end. They use images to help the audience visualize data, yet they know that the pictures must always remain secondary to clear description. They share future plans and finish the presentation on a strong note. Good speakers do all of theabove while sharing their ideas with enthusiasm.

But there is a caveat to the techniques described in this book: They need not be followed all at once.

In an age when so much communication is tethered to technology, delivering messages face-to-face has paradoxically become even more vital to professional success. We all have ready access to more information than any of our ancestors did. At the click of a few keys, we can locate reams of facts on any topic under the sun. But although the amount of data available to us has grown, the number of hours in a day has not. Amidst this flood of information, technology can make getting to the pertinent bits of data much more challenging. And that is where a good public speaker becomes a priceless commodity. Listening to a clear and concise speaker is still the most time-efficient way to comprehend new information.

Yet even with its known benefits, most of us view addressing a group of people as a dreaded burden. That may be even more the case for scientists. In addition to the concerns that all speakers have, they must present specialized and complex data.

Some of the dread is also due to the fact that the craft of public speaking is not taught properly. For most of us, it was never taught at all. We all have had to learn by painful trial and error.

The issue we want to address is not whether human beings should be understood naturalistically or supernaturalistically. Rather, our question concerns the kinds of naturalistic explanations that are needed to account for the features that human beings exhibit. If a factor C helps explain some feature E of nonhuman organisms, should we infer that C also helps explain E when E is present in human beings? The choice that interests us is between unified and disunified explanations. Do human beings fall into patterns exhibited by the rest of nature, or are we the result of fundamentally different causal processes?

Although evolutionary theory is often seen as the vehicle for understanding human beings as part of the natural order, it would be wrong to assume that evolutionary explanations are automatically unified. An evolutionary explanation for why two species have a feature need not claim that they have that feature for the same reason. Fir trees are green and so are iguanas, and there is an evolutionary explanation for each of these outcomes; however, iguanas and fir trees are green for very different evolutionary reasons. In fact, within an evolutionary framework there are four possible patterns of explanation, not just two; these can be described by beginning with the three options depicted in Figure 3.1.

In case 1, the two species (S1 and S2) are similar because they inherited their shared feature from a common ancestor (A); the similarity is a homology.

When I first started doing philosophy some forty years ago, evolutionary ethics was the philosophical equivalent of a bad smell. One knew that not only was it false, but somehow it was unclean – it was the sign that one had a tin ear for philosophy. Had not G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica shown that evolutionary ethics commits the greatest of all sins, that it ignores or plows through the “naturalistic fallacy”? Or, to put matters in a more historical context, did not evolutionary ethics violate the distinction drawn by David Hume between “is” and “ought”? Now, however, we have had something of a sea change, and it is almost the norm for philosophers interested in morality to admit, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, that evolution surely counts for something. But how much is that “something”? That is still the matter of debate.

NORMATIVE ETHICS

In dealing philosophically with morality, there are always two levels to be discussed: normative or substantive ethics, which deals with what one ought to do (“love your neighbor as yourself”), and metaethics, which deals with why one ought to do what one ought to do (“God wants you to love your neighbor as yourself”). If one is trying to link evolution and normative ethics, then most obviously one will be trying to show that human ethical relationships are produced by evolution.

A long-standing interest in how biological evolution and ethics relate to each other has focused on the relevance of evolutionism (and subsequent naturalism) to the existence and status of moral values and to the character of moral agency. Discussions regarding the relevance of biology to ethics date back to Aristotle, and when the concept of evolutionism first appeared, it was immediately taken to have important bearings on moral thinking (Maienschein and Ruse 1999). Yet, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the interest in these issues really bloomed. More recently, the explanatory and academic success of the “new” biological sciences, such as molecular genetics, ethology, neurobiology, and neuropsychology, opened up promising possibilities for a more profound comprehension of human behavior, including normatively guided agency. Moreover, current debates seem to show that only an integrated contribution of all these sciences can shed light on human agency. Thus, philosophers are now becoming increasingly interested in questions such as whether and how ethics relates to our biological nature, and whether and how aspects of human biology bear upon our social practices.

Within these debates, increasingly pressing questions concern the relevance of recent developments in contemporary biological sciences in furthering our understanding of the relationship between evolutionism and ethics. The problem then arises of understanding how these issues can be correctly framed in philosophical terms. This collection of original essays offers a cutting-edge coverage of the topic and suggests some possible answers.

BIOLOGICAL ALTRUISM

Philosophical discussions of the relationship between biology and morality often gravitate to one of two positions. At the Hobbesian pole are views claiming that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that morality is a system that restrains and runs contrary to our most basic impulses. The Humean pole, by contrast, develops the idea that human beings have a natural disposition to fellow feeling, one that our moral sentiments are able to extend and refine. I hope to explain, and partially defend, a position that combines elements of both perspectives.

Both Hobbesians and Humeans take a stand on the question of altruism, and it is natural to start from our current biological understanding of the possibility (or possibilities) of altruism. For evolutionary biologists, of course, altruistic behavior is understood as behavior that increases the reproductive success of another organism at reproductive cost to the beneficiary. Throughout the twentieth century, biology faced the theoretical problem of how to reconcile the possibility of altruistic behavior with Darwinian natural selection. I am not going to dwell on the details of the history. It is enough to note that, by the end of the century, the problem had been largely solved. Thanks to theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism, to evolutionary game theory, and to a refined version of group selection, there are ample devices for showing the general possibility that altruistic behavior can originate and be maintained under natural selection.

Discussions about the relations between genes and free will, in particular in relation to morality, are nothing but a new chapter of an old story, the beginning of which can be traced back before the birth of Western philosophy. Is man really free in choosing moral values and moral actions? Are there biological, physical, metaphysical, or divine constraints?

We know that throughout the history of philosophy, the debates on moral freedom have reached an extremely high degree of sophistication. Certainly this is not the place to deal with this vast topic. More modestly we will limit ourselves to consider some data coming from genetics, in order to understand, from a biological point of view, to what extent we can say we have free moral will, and how far our freedom can reach.

A long-standing tradition, well expressed in Dante Alighieri's verses, holds the view that free will is a specific characteristic of humans. But some scholars thought that all human choices are determined. In particular there were those supporting the idea that man's choices are determined by his genome: we would be our genes.

MORAL CAPACITY

Reflecting on the biological foundations of human moral behavior within a Darwinian framework should involve something too often forgotten: finding actual links with what Darwin proposed in his writings. This task should not be intended as a philosophically idle form of deference to an author of the past, but as a necessary step to recover the correct historical and theoretical bases of the problems we are facing. Indeed, an interest in the history does not necessarily mean to commit fallacies akin to argumentum ad verecundiam, but it can take the form of a correct argumentum ad auctoritatem. In considering what Darwin wrote about the biological bases of morality, I will recall some of the theses of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man that, mutatis mutandis, could be accepted without much difficulty by those who believe in the correctness and validity of (neo-)Darwinian evolutionism.

INTRODUCTION

Morality is related variously to behavioral tendencies and cognitive capacities. In this chapter, I do not discuss what the forms and modes of these relations can be. Instead, I focus on the topic of the homologues in the nervous system and then consider whether and to what extent the capacities that are relevant for morality can be explained through biological comparisons. Nevertheless, the quest for the biological basis of behavior and cognition must rely on a sound comparative approach, satisfying Theodor Bullock's three Rs requirement (roots, rules, relevance; cf. Bullock 1983) for the study of cognition and highly integrated behavior. The satisfaction of this requirement, indeed, seems to be the only way to discern scientifically plausible biological hypotheses from merely intriguing scientifically sounding metaphors.

In what follows, I argue that any attempt to explain (human) ethics through considerations concerning animal behavior is hopeless, unless we manage to individuate strict homological correspondences among all the feasible generic analogies between human behavior and animal behavior.

This conclusion is reached through an argument that involves five theses.

The traditional nature-nurture controversy concerns whether ethical norms and social practices depend on cultural influences on individuals and societies or whether they are based on the particular features of our nature. In this chapter, we argue that nature and nurture cannot be sharply distinguished, as some scientists have tried to do in the past. Evolutionary considerations lead us to conclude that facts about our nature and the ways in which we come to form cultural traditions are entrenched in evolutionary processes. Before turning to the issue, though, we thought it might be worthwhile to deal first with two possible misunderstandings.

First, when we claim that we are concerned with the “bases” of ethical norms and practices, we do not mean that we offer a precise account of the ways in which such bases are relevant for the explanation or the justification of ethics. In particular, we do not deal with the question whether ethical systems or moral norms can be reduced to natural facts or cultural facts.

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND “JUST-SO STORIES”

Darwin's claim is probably guilty of pardonable exaggeration. After all he did not prove the origin of man, and Locke's greatest contributions were to political philosophy, not metaphysics. But it may turn out that Darwin's twentieth-century grandchild, genomics, vindicates this claim with respect to both metaphysics and political philosophy. Here I focus on the latter claim alone, however.

From the year that William Hamilton first introduced the concept of inclusive fitness and the mechanism of kin selection, biologists, psychologists, game theorists, philosophers, and others have been adding details to answer the question of how altruism is possible as a biological disposition. We now have a fairly well-articulated story of how we could have gotten from there, nature red in tooth and claw, to here, an almost universal commitment to morality. That is, there is now a scenario showing how a lineage of organisms selected for maximizing genetic representation in subsequent generations could come eventually to be composed of cooperating creatures. Establishing this bare possibility was an important turning point for biological anthropology, for human sociobiology, and for evolutionary psychology. Prior to Hamilton's breakthrough it was intellectually permissible to write off Darwinism as irrelevant to distinctively human behavior and human institutions.