Darwin's Moral Compass: Mutual Interdependence

In Origin of Species, 150 years ago, Charles Darwin opened a can of worms. Or so it has been to his detractors, who blame society's ills on evolution. Church attendance fell, ethnic supremacists arose, and God got lost somewhere in all of it. With God went man's higher moral purpose. All was a case of nature red in tooth and claw.

They overlook that Darwin described a system of mutual interdependence that "had governed life on Earth for billions of years; a system that managed simultaneously to be incredibly liberal and fiercely restrictive."

In this was Darwin's moral compass. If his guiding principles are followed by later generations, humankind could continue to survive. Ignore mutual interdependence and expect extinction. We will go the way of other species.Unlike other species, we can read the compass. Will we follow it? More at The Australian.