leviathan-supersystem:

so one of the better criticism i’ve received of my whole notion of viewing morality primarily through the lens of incentive structures driven by memetic scripts, and thus primarily a function of social conditioning, was when someone argued out that animals seem to have some rudimentary form of what we’d call “morality” (even in the feeding frenzy, the piranhas don’t eat each other) but obviously couldn’t transmit information memetically, since they don’t have language, meaning morality had to be instinct rather than socially generated, - i argued that it was possible for animals to have social incentive systems and for these to transfer memetically without language, but when challenged i couldn’t name an example

until now! at least the part about incentive systems, not necessarily them being transferred memeticaly

so basically vampire bats have a very communal social structure, and will share their food by taking the blood back to the nest in a throat sac to then feed not only their own children, but also the other children of their colony.

so to test what would happen if a bat was perceived as being selfish, and not contributing to the group, their filled a bat’s throat-sac with air, causing the other bats to think the bat in question had gotten blood and wasn’t sharing any- in response, they other bats later refused to feed that bat or her children.

this shows that the altruistic behavior in vampire bats is not based in pure instinct, but is upheld by structures of social incentives- of course, this still leaves open the possibility that the incentive structure is instinctual- but i think it likely is memetically transferred, not through language of course but through observation, though i admit that without testing this is just a hunch.

so while a lot of questions remain unanswered, it’s still a compelling clue that social incentive structures, and hence, some rudimentary kind of “morality.” likely pre-dates language by a substantial margin, given that language clearly isn’t necessary for them to exist.