What is the evolutionary function of evil?

Answer 1

I think this would have made a better question in the "Religion" forum, but, by strict definition, evolution is not concerned with "good" or "evil". It is the way by which a given organism changes (i.e., mutates) over a given time to produce an organism which can better deal with its environment than its predecessors/antecedents, or are less able to deal with their environment and thus will perish.

There are no "good" or "evil" creatures; it's only the creature called "man" that makes those distinctions, and even then, you could ask a dozen people what their definition of "good" and "evil" are, and you might get a dozen different answers!

Man has been on this planet for too short a time, geologically speaking, for there to be any real difference in his (please spare me any politically correct diatribe!) own evolution, although it could be argued that both good and evil have played a part in it: the former by extending life through improvements in agriculture, medicine, living conditions, etc, and the latter by premature deaths due to violence and war, etc. However, even that is relatively short-term; but, take all such occurrences out of the picture (including all manmade weapons, drugs (good and bad), etc), and man might himself overwhelmed by the meekest creatures, such as insects (thus the old adage, "The meek shall inherit the Earth").

But, to paraphrase an old joke, "G-d must have loved bad guys, because He made so many of them!" ;)

Answer 2

There is no "good" or "evil" in science, and hence, evolution as well. Humans find evil things frightening, and the fear responce is an evolutionary adaptation which minimizes danger. Anything frightened will run away from danger to save itself.

Evolution does have a dark secret, however. The process is accelerated by mass extinctions. When entire ecosystems collapse, it opens opportunities for new species to evolve. These new species are frequently more sophisticated than the ones they replace. The evolution of mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs is a very good example.

Humans now appear to be driving the next great wave of extinction/evolution. Of course when science eventually allows humans to create life itself, perhaps this is the closest that evolution will come to being actually evil.

Answer 3

Evil is not something that actually exorcists, it is a subjective measure of something.

So the question to ask is does our perception of evil provide any evolutionary advantage?

I believe there are some cases that could be made for this. For example, people we tend to view as evil are usually of an out group. Those people are different and evil. This allows us to always prefer our in group, who are more likely to carry many of the same gene's as ourselves, while actively fighting against the out group who are more genetically dissimilar.

I'm sure a few other very good reasons could be thought of as well.

Answer 4

Immorality is the collateral damage of evolutionary strategies, so to speak. Evil is a necessary but unintended consequence of evolution.

Answer 5

If there were no evil then we would not be able to distinguish good in the sense that light would be meaningless without dark as a contrast. In other words, evil is a necessary evil.

Answer 6

To justify war and make one feel good about punishig or harming another.

Ths is social evolution, not biological.