Abstract

Bernard Malamud's God's Grace (1982) is a neo-Darwinian Beast Fable about morality in a thermonuclear age. It serves me as a starting point for a fresh look at the fundamental questions surrounding morality and altruism. There is no doubt any more that, from the standpoint of multilevel selection, morality is a form of compromise among competing spheres of genetic self-interest. The result is a tug-of-war between two adaptive vectors: the egoistic and competitive "me first" versus the prosocial and cooperative "we-first."

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