Part 8:5B John Fiske’s 1874 recognition of the obvious truth that nurturing created our moral sense

Like the truths of our corrupted human-condition-afflicted state and of Integrative Meaning, the importance of nurturing in both the maturation of our own lives and in the maturation of our species is an obvious truth. While we have had to live in denial of it, we all intuitively know that a mother’s love is crucial to the creation of a well-adjusted human and that we are all born with an instinctive expectation of receiving unconditionally selfless love from our mother. And it’s also obvious that such powerful instincts to nurture with love and be nurtured with love can’t have come from nowhere. To be so strong in us they must have played a significant role in our species’ development. So yes, if we weren’t living in denial of the importance of nurturing in human life, it wouldn’t be hard to work out that our unconditionally selfless moral instincts were borne out of the mother-infant relationship. Charles Darwin, for example, who was a remarkably sound, secure, relatively denial-free, honest and thus effective thinker, could see that our ‘social instinct’—the ‘most noble of all attributes of man, leading him without a moment’s hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow creature’, as he described it—‘seems’ to be ‘developed’ from ‘parental’ ‘affections’. While Darwin didn’t develop the idea that nurturing created our moral sense, he did make the following two comments in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex that indicate the idea was apparent to him (again the underlinings are my emphasis): ‘The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial [family] affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents; and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection. With those animals which were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least for their comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers. With respect to the origin of the parental and filial affections, which apparently lie at the base of the social instincts, we know not the steps by which they have been gained; but we may infer that it has been to a large extent through natural selection.’ And: ‘The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man’ (ch.4 & 5). And although the renowned anthropologist Richard Leakey wasn’t thinking honestly when he wrote that the ‘bond between mother and infant’ occurs so that her infant can have a period of ‘prolonged learning’ about its ‘environment’ (the dishonesty of this thinking will be explained shortly), he was thinking truthfully when he then emphatically asserted that ‘the basis of all primate social groups is the bond between mother and infant. That bond constitutes the social unit out of which all higher orders of society are constructed’ (Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin, Origins, 1977, p.61 of 264). In his acclaimed television series and accompanying book that was dedicated to explaining ‘the ascent of man’, the great science historian Jacob Bronowski also recognised that the ‘real vision of the human being’—of an unconditionally selfless, loving, sound, integratively behaved individual, which Christ so exemplified—is a direct product of the nurturing that takes place between a mother and her child, saying that ‘But, far more deeply, [a sound mind] depends on the long preparation of human childhood…The real vision of the human being is the child wonder, the Virgin and Child, the Holy Family’ (The Ascent of Man, 1973, pp.319-320 of 352). It’s true, the ‘family’, especially the ‘Virgin [uncorrupted, soul-intact, innocent, psychologically sound and secure mother] and child’, is ‘Holy’; ‘that bond’ does lie at the heart of what makes us, and made us as a species, truly human—namely loving and cooperative.

Yes, the crucial role played by the nurturing, loving ‘bond between mother and infant’ in ‘the ascent of man’ is a truth we are all intuitively aware of. That awareness is apparent when, for example, Africa is described as ‘the cradle of mankind’—Africa is where humanity was nurtured into existence. When the anthropologist Loren Eisely wrote that ‘Man is born of love and exists by reason of a love more continuous than in any other form of life’ (An Evolutionist Looks at Modern Man, c.1959), he was recognising the truth that humanity was ‘born of love’.

In fact, the nurturing explanation for our extraordinary unconditionally selfless, all-loving, social, moral instinctive self or soul is so obvious that only three years after Darwin tentatively ascribed the origin of our ‘social instinct’ to ‘parental’ ‘affections’, it was put forward as a developed theory by the aforementioned John Fiske in his 1874 book Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy: based on the Doctrine of Evolution. Indeed, if we were to prioritise the information that we humans need in order to understand our world and our place in it, the first item would be to explain the origins of the variety of life, which is what Darwin did with his idea of natural selection. The second would have to be to explain the origins of the particular variety of life that is the cooperative organism we call humanity, which is what Fiske did with his nurturing explanation for our species’ original instinctive unconditionally selfless, loving, moral, social sense. However, while both these fundamentally important insights were made available to us way back in the mid-1800s, the only one I was taught at school and university was Darwin’s idea of natural selection. It wasn’t until 2004 that I happened upon a comment about Fiske that I learnt of his remarkable contribution—which was many years after I had worked out that nurturing was the obvious explanation for our moral instincts. (As I have already pointed out, I first presented the nurturing, love-indoctrination explanation that I described in Part 8:4B to the scientific community in 1983 in a submission to Nature magazine. I have submitted it elsewhere many times since, but to no avail, with each submission either rejected or ignored—something I will talk further about later in this Part.)

I would now like to describe the sequence of events that led me to Fiske’s prior publication of the nurturing origins of humans’ moral sense.

While researching scientists to whom to send the 2004 Human Condition Documentary Proposal, we at the WTM found a summary compiled by the aforementioned linguist Robin Allott of some current biological explanations for the origins of human love. (Allott’s paper, ‘Evolutionary Aspects of Love and Empathy’, published in 1992 in the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems [Vol.15, No.4 353-370], can be viewed at <http://cogprints.org/3393/1/​lovempat.htm>.) In his summary, Allott firstly noted mechanistic science’s deep psychological denial of the subject of love, saying, as included earlier, that ‘Love has been described as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study.’ He then tried to define love but found it virtually impossible to find a definition for it. Allott then asked ‘how did human love evolve?’, answering perceptively that it must have evolved out of the ‘mother/infant bond’. In explaining this bond, Allott presented an explanation by the journalist Betty McCollister (which will also be put forward shortly in Part 8:13) in which she argues that given the size of our brain and, it follows, the size of our skull expanding, our human ancestors were forced to give birth to increasingly premature offspring so that the infant’s skull was sufficiently under-developed to fit through the pelvis, leaving the remainder of the skull’s growth to be finished after birth. The result of this development, it is claimed, was that these increasingly ‘unfinished’ and helpless infants required increasingly intensive and extensive care. Allott and McCollister both argued that having been thus developed this nurturing care is now an instinctive expectation of infants and if not received leaves infants seriously psychologically distressed. As will be emphasised when the McCollister version of this explanation for the importance of nurturing is reviewed in Part 8:13, this account does not recognise the real significance of nurturing of training our infants in unconditional love. In Allott’s paper, apart from recognising that ‘Love then would become essential…insofar as the success of the group…depended on effective coherence of the group’, the concepts of altruism, morality or training in cooperative, integrative selflessness are not mentioned—except for this one reference, in which Allott cites historian Dorothy Ross’ biography of the American psychoanalyst Granville Stanley Hall: ‘Amongst psychologists, Stanley Hall (see Ross, Dorothy, 1972, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet) in the United States attracted a good deal of opprobrium [abuse] by making love a central topic…“altruistic love”, he suggested, developed in the course of evolution from the necessities of maternity’ (p.262 of 482).

Continuing on the trail of this nurturing-of-love idea, Granville Stanley Hall (1844–1924) has been described as ‘the founder of organized psychology as a science and profession, the father of child psychology, and as a national leader of educational reform in America’ (PSI Cafe—psychology resource site, and Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology). According to Ross, Hall was concerned with ‘constructing a synthetic view of psychology along evolutionary lines’—an undertaking he completed and presented in 1896. Relevantly, Ross revealed ‘an important catalyst’ in Hall’s endeavour ‘was a more popular biological treatise, Henry Drummond’s Ascent of Man, published in 1894 from his Lowell Lectures of the previous year’. Ross wrote: ‘Drummond presented evolution as “the final revelation of the unity of the world” which could…“explain everything by one great end.” To Darwin’s principle of natural selection by means of the struggle for survival, he added another principle that he considered far more important—“the Struggle for the Life of Others,” or “altruistic Love,” which developed in the course of evolution from the necessities of maternity. The human mother he regarded as virtually the highest product of evolution.’ Interestingly, in terms of the theme of existence of love having been acknowledged by other early scientists (unlike their contemporary counterparts), a footnote on page 262 of Ross’ book states that ‘Hall also knew Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson’s, The Evolution of Sex (London: Walter Scott, 1889), which likewise described love as the universal dynamic in nature and altruistic love as the real law of evolution.’

Henry Drummond (1851–1897) was a Scottish scientist, evangelist and author. In his 1894 book The Ascent of Man, his account of how ‘altruistic love’ developed ‘from the necessities of maternity’ is given in the chapter titled ‘The Evolution of a Mother’. The following is a condensation of this chapter: ‘The…pinnacle of the temple of Nature…is…The Mammalia, THE MOTHERS…[it is] That care for others, from which the Mammalia take their name…All elementary animals are orphans…they waken to isolation, to apathy, to the attentions only of those who seek their doom. But as we draw nearer the apex of the animal kingdom, the spectacle of a protective Maternity looms into view…[the] love of offspring…That early world, therefore, for millions and millions of years was a bleak and loveless world. It was a world without children and a world without Mothers. It is good to realize how heartless Nature was till these arrived…the ethical effect…of this early arrangement was nil…There was no time to love, no opportunity to love, and no object to love…Now, before Maternal Love can be evolved out of this first care…Nature must…cause fewer young to be produced at a birth…make them helpless, so that for a time they must dwell with her…And…she…dwell with them…In this [Mammal] child…infancy reaches its last perfection. Housed, protected, sumptuously fed, the luxurious children keep to their Mother’s side for months and years, and only quit the parental roof when their filial education [in love] is complete…[these] drawings together of parent and child are the inevitable preliminaries of the domestication of the Human Race…On the physiological side, the name of this impelling power is lactation; on the ethical side, it is Love. And there is no escape henceforth from communion between Mother and child…Mother teaches a Child, but in a far deeper sense it is the Child who teaches the Mother [to be loving]. Millions of millions of Mothers had lived in the world before this, but the higher affections were unborn. Tenderness, gentleness, unselfishness, love, care, self-sacrifice—these as yet were not, or were only in the bud. Maternity existed in humble forms, but not yet Motherhood. To create Motherhood and all that enshrines…required a human child…The only thing that remains now is…that they [human mother and child] shall both be kept in that school as long as it is possible to…give affection time to grow…No animal except Man was permitted to have his education [in love] thus prolonged…Why…The question has been answered for us by Mr. John Fiske, and the world here owes to him one of the most beautiful contributions ever made to the Evolution of Man. We know what this delay means ethically—it was necessary for moral training that the human child should have the longest possible time by its Mother’s side—but what determines it on the physical side?…a human brain…[where relatively speaking] no storage of habit has been handed down from the past…the higher brain is comparatively a new thing in the world…[and] are in perfect order only after a considerable interval of adjustment and elaboration. Now Infancy…means the fitting up of this extra machinery within the brain…Childhood in its early stage is a series of installations…In the savage state, where the after-life is simple, the adjustments [for life] are made with comparative ease and speed; but as we rise in the scale of civilization the necessary period of Infancy lengthens step by step until in the case of the most highly educated man, where adjustments must be made to a wide intellectual environment, the age of tutelage extends for almost a quarter of a century. The use of all this to morals, the reactions especially upon the Mother, are too obvious…A sheep knows its lamb only while it is a lamb. The affection in these cases, fierce enough while it lasts, is soon forgotten, and the traces it left in the brain are obliterated before they have furrowed into habit [Note here confirmation that the training in love wears off with age, which, as has been explained, is why there was selection for neotenising youth in the love-indoctrination process]…To her [the human mother] alone was given a curriculum prolonged enough to let her graduate in the school of the affections…It may or may not be that the child will acquire its Mother’s virtue. But unselfishness has scored; its child has proved itself fitter to survive than the child of Selfishness…A few score more of centuries, a few more millions of Mothers, and the germs of Patience, Carefulness, Tenderness, Sympathy, and Self-Sacrifice will have rooted themselves in Humanity…However short the earliest infancies, however feeble the sparks they fanned, however long heredity took to gather fuel enough for a steady flame, it is certain that once this fire began to warm the cold hearth of Nature and give humanity a heart, the most stupendous task of the past was accomplished. A softened pressure of an uncouth hand, a human gleam in an almost animal eye, an endearment in an inarticulate voice—feeble things enough. Yet in these faint awakenings lay the hope of the human race. [And here Drummond quotes Fiske] “From of old we have heard the monition, ‘Except ye be as babes ye cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven’; the latest science now shows us—though in a very different sense of the words—that unless we had been as babes, the ethical phenomena which give all its significance to the phrase ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ would have been non-existent for us. Without the circumstances of Infancy we might have become formidable among animals through sheer force of sharp-wittedness. But except for these circumstances we should never have comprehended the meaning of such phrases as ‘self-sacrifice’ or ‘devotion.’ The phenomena of social life would have been omitted from the history of the world, and with them the phenomena of ethics and religion.”’

Drummond acknowledges Fiske’s ‘beautiful contribution’ as the originator of the idea of the long infancy creating a sense of morality in humans, sourcing the remarkable quote that concludes the above extract to Fiske’s 1874 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy: based on the Doctrine of Evolution (Vol.IV, Part II, ch.XXII ‘Genesis of Man, Morally’, p.162).

To introduce him more fully, John Fiske (1842–1901) was an American philosopher, historian and author. In the preface to one of his books he wrote that ‘The detection of the part played by the lengthening of infancy in the genesis of the human race is my own especial contribution to the Doctrine of Evolution’ (Through Nature to God, 1899). The following is a condensation of the ‘Genesis of Man, Morally’ chapter from Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy: ‘There are two things, said [Immanuel] Kant, which fill me with awe…the starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us…in the study of the moral sense we contemplate the last and noblest product of evolution…it is well to state, at the outset, that the existence of a moral sense and moral intuitions in civilized man is fully granted…emotions, leading him to seek the right and avoid the wrong… actions deemed right are those which conduce to the fulness of life of the Community…We approve of certain actions and disapprove of certain actions quite instinctively. We shrink from stealing or lying as we shrink from burning our fingers…In short, there is in our psychical structure a moral sense which is as quickly and directly hurt by wrong-doing or the idea of wrong-doing…It is now time to propose an answer to the question…How did social evolution originate?…In the permanent family we have the germ of society…while the nervous connections accompanying a simple intelligence are already organized at birth, the nervous connections accompanying a complex intelligence are chiefly organized after birth. Thus there arise the phenomena of infancy…the period during which the nerve connections…are becoming permanently established. Now this period, which only begins to exist when the intelligence is considerably complex, becomes longer and longer as the intelligence increases in complexity. In the human race it is much longer than in any other race of mammals, and it is much longer in the civilized man than in the savage. Indeed among the educated classes…it may be…more than a quarter of a century…Throughout the animal kingdom the period of infancy is correlated with feelings of parental affection…The prolongation [of infancy] must… have been gradual, and the same increase of intelligence to which it was due must also have prolonged the correlative parental feelings, by associating them more and more with anticipations and memories. The concluding phases of this long change may be witnessed in the course of civilization. Our parental affections now endure through life…I believe we have now reached a… satisfactory explanation of…Sociality…The prolongation of infancy accompanying the development of intelligence, and the correlative extension of parental feelings…The prolonged helplessness of the offspring must keep the parents together for longer and longer periods in successive epochs… primeval…family groups…differ widely…from modern families…The sociality is but nascent: infants are drowned, wives are beaten to death…in modern families evanescent barbarism shows itself in internal quarrels…Savages are not unfrequently capable of extreme devotion and self-sacrifice when the interests of the tribe are at stake…But…savage virtues are, in general, confined to the clan. The…savage…is also capable of the most fiendish cruelty…toward the members of another clan…Fijis, are exceptionally ferocious…though the savage has the germ of a moral sense, which prompts him…to postpone his personal welfare to that of his clan, he can by no means be accredited with a fully developed moral sense…In asserting that we possess an instinctive and inherited moral sense, it is not meant that we possess, anterior to education and experience, an organic preference for certain particular good actions, and an organic repugnance to certain particular bad actions. We do not inherit a horror of stealing, any more than the Hindu inherits the horror of killing cattle. We simply inherit a feeling which leads us, when we are told that stealing is wrong, to shun it, without needing to be taught that it is detrimental to society…the civilized man surpasses the lowest savage by a far greater interval than that by which the lowest savage surpasses the highest ape; just as the gulf between the cerebral capacity of the Englishman and that of the non-Aryan dweller in Hindustan is six times greater than the gulf which similarly divides the non-Aryan Hindu from the gorilla…In this new suggestion as to the causes and the effects of the prolonged infancy of man, I believe we have a suggestion as fruitful as the one which we owe to Mr. Wallace.’ The chapter then concludes with the quote Drummond used to end his dissertation—‘From of old we have heard the monition, “Except ye be as babes ye cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven”’, etc (see end of Drummond’s Ascent of Man quote above for the rest of this, ‘Except ye be as babes…’, passage).

Fiske was right in recognising the immense significance of the long infancy and the presence, therefore, of exceptionally maternal mothers as providing the basis for the development of a sense of morality in humans. In doing so, he recognised the basic elements of the love-indoctrination process. In 1874, which as emphasised was only 15 years after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, we see that Fiske described his own work as ‘the latest science’. Dorothy Ross accurately recognised the full significance of Fiske’s explanation when she recorded Drummond’s 1894 assessment of it: ‘To Darwin’s principle of natural selection by means of the struggle for survival, he [Drummond] added another principle that he considered far more important—“the Struggle for the Life of Others,” or “altruistic Love,” which developed in the course of evolution from the necessities of maternity.’ In this assessment, Drummond recognised firstly that unconditional selflessness or ‘altruistic Love’ is the very theme of existence with natural selection being less material as merely a means for its development, and secondly that the all-important unconditionally selfless ‘altruistic Love’ was able to be ‘developed in the course of evolution from the necessities of maternity’.

Not long after Drummond’s 1894 re-emphasis of Fiske’s nurturing-of-love idea, Hall again brought it to the public attention’s in 1896. BUT, following Hall’s efforts, this ‘latest science’, ‘one of the most beautiful contributions ever made to the Evolution of Man’ of the mechanism for developing the unconditionally selfless, ‘altruistic Love’ that was a ‘far more important’ ‘principle’ than Darwin’s selfish, ‘natural selection by means of the struggle for survival’, was ignored and left to die—in fact, even by Hall’s time it had already ‘attracted a good deal of opprobrium [abuse]’—to only now be independently re-admitted and resurrected, over a century after Fiske’s admission of the concept in 1874. As emphasised, that ideas do keep resurfacing is what you would expect of a universal truth; further, the fact that such an obvious universal truth hasn’t been frequently put forward is evidence of the extent of our denial of such a truth, which is in turn evidence of the magnitude of the problem of our human condition—our species’ insecurity about its loveless state. As Allott said, love has become a subject that is ‘not appropriate for scientific study’.

Again, the fundamental necessity for accepting the nurturing hypothesis for human origins was that it be accompanied by the explanation of the human condition, because only when our inability to nurture our children was able to be understood would it be psychologically safe for humans to admit the importance of nurturing. Humanity needed the whole truth, all the explanations that make confronting the human condition possible delivered together, and that is what is being presented here. With the explanation of the human condition now found, the truth of Integrative Meaning, the truth of our unconditionally selfless moral soul, the truth of how nurturing created it, and all the other truths that humanity has been living in denial of, can finally be admitted.

There are deficiencies in Fiske’s explanation of the origin of our morality, which is not surprising given the infancy of the field and the scarcity of scientific knowledge in his time. Firstly, ‘Prolonged infancy’ didn’t ‘accompany the development of intelligence’; rather, as will be explained in the coming Part 8:7B, ‘How, why and when did consciousness emerge in humans?’, prolonged infancy, and the nurturing of selflessness, liberated consciousness, which only strongly developed after the love-indoctrination process was well established. The large brain didn’t develop until after the extended infancy and intense nurturing took place, as evidenced by bonobos, which do not have a very large brain but are intensely nurturing and already neotenous.

Secondly, how the trained love became instinctive is particularly unclear in the explanations put forward by both Fiske and Drummond. While Drummond is specific about how the instinct for strong nurturing affections of tenderness, self-sacrifice, etc, became instinctive in mothers, he doesn’t say whether the selfless qualities become instinctive in the offspring. In fact, he said, ‘It may or may not be that the child will acquire its Mother’s virtue.’ On this matter, Fiske began by saying, ‘We [humans] approve of certain actions and disapprove of certain actions quite instinctively. We shrink from stealing or lying as we shrink from burning our fingers’ and ‘there is in our psychical structure a moral sense.’ However, he later stated that ‘In asserting that we possess an instinctive and inherited moral sense, it is not meant that we possess, anterior to education and experience, an organic preference for certain particular good actions, and an organic repugnance to certain particular bad actions. We do not inherit a horror of stealing, any more than the Hindu inherits the horror of killing cattle. We simply inherit a feeling which leads us, when we are told that stealing is wrong, to shun it, without needing to be taught that it is detrimental to society.’ This last quote seems to imply that Fiske believed that the extent of our instinctive conscience didn’t go beyond a kind of predisposition to acquiring a conscience, this despite having said, ‘We approve of certain actions and disapprove of certain actions quite instinctively.’

It is clear that both Fiske and Drummond had difficulty reconciling humans’ current morality-defying, upset, corrupted state—the fact that people can be extremely brutal and aggressive—with the view that we have moral instincts. They attempted to resolve the problem by asserting that such instincts for love only emerged in relatively recent times within ‘civilized’ people who have a fading, ‘evanescent barbarism’, despite the fact this theory does not allow anything like sufficient time for altruistic training to become instinctive. Drummond said: ‘In the savage state, where the after-life is simple, the adjustments [for life] are made with comparative ease and speed; but as we rise in the scale of civilization the necessary period of Infancy lengthens step by step until in the case of the most highly educated man, where adjustments must be made to a wide intellectual environment, the age of tutelage extends for almost a quarter of a century.’ Fiske similarly noted that infancy ‘is much longer in the civilized man than in the savage. Indeed among the educated classes…it may be…more than a quarter of a century’. He then proceeded to say: ‘primeval…family groups…differ widely…from modern families…The sociality is but nascent: infants are drowned, wives are beaten to death…in modern families evanescent barbarism shows itself in internal quarrels…Savages are not unfrequently capable of extreme devotion and self-sacrifice when the interests of the tribe are at stake…​But…​savage virtues are, in general, confined to the clan. The…savage…is also capable of the most fiendish cruelty…toward the members of another clan…Fijis, are exceptionally ferocious…though the savage has the germ of a moral sense, which prompts him…to postpone his personal welfare to that of his clan, he can by no means be accredited with a fully developed moral sense.’

Overall, what Fiske and Drummond were unaware of was what happened since we acquired an instinctive orientation to cooperative integration, namely the intervention of the immensely upsetting battle of the human condition; innocent, completely integrated man was the australopithecines who lived from five to two million years ago, but we needed understanding of what took place since, and who we became as a result.

And finally, Fiske’s claimed moral superiority of ‘civilized’ people, and ‘cerebral capacity’ comparisons between the ‘Aryan’ ‘Englishman’ and the ‘Hindustan’ are false and morally abhorrent. As has been explained before, civility is the mask humans have used to conceal the full extent of our upset, human-condition-afflicted state. Indeed, to some degree, the more upset we have become, the greater need we have had for civility. As has been pointed out, there are very substantial differences in alienation between individual humans and indeed between races of humans as a result of their different encounters with the necessary and heroic, but upsetting, battle of the human condition—but no human, or race of humans, is ‘better’ than or ‘superior’ to another. Understanding of the necessary but upsetting battle of the human condition entirely eliminates the concept of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ from all conceptualisation of ourselves.

The outstanding question is, why did Fiske’s fundamentally important explanation for the origins of our moral instincts that created ‘humanity’—‘one of the most beautiful contributions ever made to the Evolution of Man’—virtually vanish from scientific discourse; why wasn’t I taught the nurturing explanation for our altruistic moral nature at school, or when I studied biology at university; why did I have to work the idea out myself? Why was this ‘altruistic’ ‘principle’ that was ‘considered far more important’ than the ‘principle of natural selection’, and which Fiske explained was able to be developed in our forebears by ‘the necessities of maternity’, allowed to so disappear from biological discourse that in the 140 years that have elapsed since Fiske presented his explanation a veritable mountain of books have been published presenting all manner of unaccountable, dishonest theories for the origins of our species’ extraordinary moral nature? Why, when we had the truth, has there been such a colossal amount of tragically misguided effort that, as we will see, has now resulted in the dangerously dishonest, misleading Social Ecological/​Self-Domestication explanations for our moral soul? And why, in turn, has this nurturing, love-indoctrination explanation for our moral soul—and, indeed, all my work—not just been rejected and ignored, but (as I will document later) so ruthlessly attacked that I was made a pariah, and those helping disseminate these insights ostracised?

Incidentally, in a further illustration of how obvious the nurturing explanation for our moral soul really is, while writing this Part an internet search for references to John Fiske turned up an article that reveals that the love-indoctrination explanation was actually first put forward, albeit in a crude form, back in 1834, which is even prior to Darwin’s publication of his theory of natural selection. In an essay titled ‘On the Helpless State of Infancy’, which is simply signed “V.F.”, it says: ‘Thus gracious hath Providence been to man, in rendering the ties of parental and filial affection so much more permanent in this His noblest work, than in any of His inferior creatures…on account of the helpless condition of man in his state of infancy and childhood; because this very helplessness, by demanding the constant and long-continued attention of parents, gives rise to, and renders habitual, the tender charities of domestic and social life’ (see Wesley Raymond Wells’ paper ‘An Historical Anticipation of John Fiske’s theory regarding the value of infancy’, Journal of Philosophy, 1922, Vol.19, No.8). So, the love-indoctrination explanation has indeed been continually found and continually left to die! Why?