"Ethics, Cooperation and the Gender Wars: Prospects for a New Asceticism"
In the fourth lecture of the Aberdeen Gifford Lecture Series 2012, Professor Sarah Coakley takes a necessary detour into current, but less-known, evolutionary debates about sexual selection, gender performance, and cooperation. Here, again, there is a fascinating current theoretical stand-off between competing paradigms of explanation: an older, Darwinian, theory of "sexual selection" in which male mating is of prime interest, and a more recent and close attention to parental efficacy, and the role of cooperation in it. The importance for species flourishing of even non-reproducing individuals is particularly intriguing here: might this cause a reconsideration of the importance, in "cultural evolution", of ascetic and celibate vocations inspired by transcendent ethical ideals?
Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God
In this series, Professor Sarah Coakley explores the implications of recent developments in the mathematical study of "evolutionary dynamics" for ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of science and theology. Arguing that the last decades of the twentieth century saw a notable failure of nerve in universal accounts of religious rationality, and a simultaneous obsession with the "selfishness" of evolutionary phenomena, Coakley seeks to clarify afresh the importance of the countervailing sacrificial dimensions of evolutionary processes for central issues in the philosophy of science and ethics. Thereby she moves to suggest a transformed way forward in the task of "natural theology".
Негізгі бет Gifford Lecture 26 April 2012 - Ethics, Cooperation and the Gender Wars
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