Evolved Morality Poem by David Welch

Humans seem rather peculiar
amidst all the species out there;
reason, language, high emotions,
from romantic love to despair.
But one thing you always notice,
regardless of where you might go,
that all our tribes and nations have
established their own moral codes.
These differ from hierarchy,
the kind you'd see in a wolf pack,
such things are built upon power,
the deeper thinking they all lack.
Wolves don't ask, ‘Do I believe this?
Do I think, in essence, it's right? '
They go along mostly through fear
of what happens if they lose a fight.

This holds true for most animals,
all lacking our reasoning skills,
we tell ourselves we make these codes
to ensure we don't harm or kill.
As if we all sat down one day
and said, 'We'll do this to survive, '
or we say that it comes from God,
Who is watching over our lives.
Now I won't speculate on that,
no human mind can think that large,
but I wonder, is it hubris
to think that nature took no part?
To say that it all came from us,
when we'd evolved up to this state?
I know humans can do so much,
but have we ever been that great?

A thought that's been nagging at me
when I see the animal realm,
all species seem to have a check
so that they do not overwhelm.
The predators are limited
by the abundance of their prey,
they can never outnumber them,
or they'd starve with nothing to slay.
The herbivores are limited
by the predator's claws and teeth,
so they don't grow and crop the plants,
like the endless deer in the east.
We've long known of nature's balance,
but when looking at human kind,
it seems something more is needed
to restrain advanced human minds.

Because when it comes to killing
most admit, we're a class all our own,
the reason that has propelled us,
makes us the cruelest ever known.
Bears that are ten times human strength
run in fear of us at mere sight,
tigers that once ruled the jungle
barely even put up a fight.
Small pox that killed millions of us
was purposely wiped from the earth,
we could glass this entire planet,
and make its very atoms hurt.
How does evolution check this?
What keeps these skills from running mad?
As we've seen from sociopaths
an unrestrained human is bad.

To me it seems morality
is what holds us back from the edge,
what keeps us from just destroying,
and leaving all enemies dead.
But more and more I think that it
was not some product of our mind,
but a product of evolution
that developed slowly with time.
Since no predator can stop us,
since we defeat even disease,
did we evolve our moral sense
to check those who act viciously?
Were the ones who killed unrestrained
killed off by their own aggression?
Were those first real moral stirrings
what kept folks from being undone?

Were the humans who lacked such thoughts
winnowed down, soon too few to breed?
Did evolution select those
able to resist killer creeds?
Is that why so few people now
have those brute, psychopathic brains?
Are those people just leftovers,
from a strategy now disdained?
If so, it means our moral codes,
are not something we made ourselves,
but just evolution's response
to minds that can make living hell.
It wasn't some higher calling
that kept us all from being wrecked,
morality is nature's way
of keeping our species in check.