Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

The goal of this book is to begin a conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the context of science.

I hope to show that when talking about values, we are actually talking about an interdependent world of facts.

…I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want – and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics.

and so on. In other words, Harris is presenting us with a utilitarian version of the Good, somewhat similar to Mill’s. However, Mill understood the difference between subjective and objective, or transcendental, good, and was actually quite apologetic about the arbitrariness of associating the Good with utility writ large. Not so Harris. As is evident from the quotes above, and much else in The Moral Landscape, he simply links the Good with “living the best lives possible,” “human flourishing,” etc., as if the link needed no explanation and were intuitively obvious to any intelligent human being. In the first place, one could make no such connection between the Good and “human flourishing,” applicable not just to Sam Harris, but all the rest of us as well, unless the Good actually had an objective existence of its own. In the second place, such a proceeding flies in the face of all the knowledge we have so painstakingly acquired about the wellsprings of morality in the evolved behavioral traits of our species; human nature if you will.

If you still don’t see the connection, I suggest you Google “Helian,” and “Harris.” I’ve written several other posts on the subject.

Heaven forefend that Ardrey’s work should ever become the basis for a new religion. I’m sure it’s the last thing he would have wanted. He always made a point of emphasizing that he wasn’t omniscient. He was much too brilliant a man to want to become the founder of some new system.

As for Montagu, he actually did the world a great service by giving it “Man and Aggression.” That little book documents the fact, based on the testimony of the most influential blank slaters of the day, that Ardrey was their most influential and credible opponent, at least from the time he appeared on the scene through 1968, when the book was published, with Konrad Lorenz a close second. In doing so he saved us the trouble of refuting the imaginary history of the demise of the Blank Slate created by Steven Pinker in his book of that name. Instead, we can just laugh about it, and point to Montagu’s book. Pinker went to a great deal of trouble writing his tome, citing the works of all sorts of scientists and philosophers, many of whom I strongly suspect he never read, or at least didn’t understand. John Stuart Mill and Margaret Mead come to mind. But to top it all off, it turns out that this “historian” of the blank slate had never even read the work of Ardrey and Lorenz, its two most effective and devastating opponents, at all. The current textbooks of Evolutionary Psychology are similarly reticent about telling the truth, to the extent that their authors even know it. It’s just too embarrassing for them to admit that the entire guild of behavioral scientists and related academic gentry could have been so wrong, and a “mere playwright” so right.

I recently re-read African Genesis, and enjoyed it more than the first time because I absorbed more of his evidence, which he modestly called an inquiry. I think his books could easily become a foundation for a new Scientology-type religion, as it unintentionally mirrors a belief system that makes more and more sense as scientific advances validate his observations. The fact that Stanley Kubrick incorporated Ardrey’s fundamental idea into the best sci-fi movie ever made, 2001 A Space Odyssey, (which I saw 100 times as a $1.10 an hour usher in high school), makes me a junkie for whatever you write about him.

Kubrick’s museum curator states Arthur Clarke was marginalized after Kubrick read African Genesis, because Clarke’s Sentinel never looked backward, only forward, and made observations about the present. His book came out after the movie. What’s with that?

Ardrey, along with Raymond Dart, simply state what humanists don’t want to contemplate. Dart was thrown a bone after the 40-year Piltdown academic disgrace and allowed to name Australopithecine Africanus (since deemed an extinct offshoot). You posted the neurological science breakthroughs and no doubt the science cannot be muzzled at this point, even with the bowdlerized Naked Ape and Montague’s excusionist rants. What they miss is out-group hostility fosters in-group cooperation.

Ardrey’s book is such a liberation for me, as a 12-year inmate of Catholic education. I never quite understood the basis of original sin. Now I know. Mankind, you are off the hook; don’t feel guilt because Nature made you this way.