THE PRINCIPLE OF PAN-PARALLEL PROCESSES
by Frank Forman
began 1999 March 14
revised 1999 October 14

Dedicated to Howard Kenneth Bloom, who will no doubt extend this simple
idea back to the Big Bang

There is very little in the universe, certainly from biological systems
on up, that does not result from the confluence of several processes
operating in parallel. Only rarely is only one process operating, but we
still try to reduce multiple processes to a single one. This article
will detail several examples of parallel processes and the failure to
reduce them to a single process.

1. Biological Selection at Multiple Levels

Just ask yourself, "Is there more pie in a smaller slice of a bigger
pie?" The answer, of course, is possibly yes, possibly no. In the case
of natural selection, this means, very simply, that gene(s) for a
feature that reduces fitness of an individual organism (a smaller slice)
but contributes to the overall success of the larger group of which the
individual is a member (making for a bigger pie) may increase over time
(more genes for that feature = more total pie) or may decrease (fewer
genes for that feature = less total pie). What happens in a specific
case is an empirical question, not a matter of logical analysis, even if
it is difficult to document, in a specific case, whether a reduction in
fitness at the level of the individual is more than compensated for by
increased fitness for the group. That such over-compensation has
occurred, and indeed is common, is the subject of Elliott Sober and
David Sloan Wilson, _Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of
Unselfish Behavior_ (Ha'va'd UP, 1998).

Notice that is issue is that of processes, not of putative equilibria.
Genes that presumably code for altruistic behavior do indeed decrease
the fitness of individuals. The number of altruistic individuals does
indeed constitute a smaller slice of the pie. If this process were to
continue to some supposed end ("equilibrium"), there would be zero
altruistic individuals left. But in the meantime, the pie increases in
size, thanks to altruistic behavior. At the putative end of *that*
process, there would be zero *groups* left that did not exhibit
altruism. It is impossible to divide zero by zero, so nothing can be
said by way of equilibrium analysis as to whether genes coding for
altruism will spread in the overall population of all the groups. What
in fact does happen, in specific cases, is a matter for empirical
investigation. Is there more pie in a smaller slice of a bigger pie, in
other words?

I invite the reader to examine any supposed refutation of group
selection, and he will invariably find reference to a long-run
equilibrium.(1) One root of this fallacy is the Unchecked Premise that
all terms in a theory can be interdefined, with none referring to the
outside world. If fitness is tautologically defined as reproductive
success, then the search is on for the one and only "unit" of selection.
But if fitness has an empirical meaning as a *measure* of the quality of
the relationship *between* a certain kind of biological entity *and its
environment*, where the environment is the set of all external factors
which influence the entity, then a Darwinian *process* is occurring if
it *happens* that entities that measure up as having superior fitness,
*for the particular environment in question*, in fact tend to leave more
descendants.

  (1) Mike Waller's article, cited below, speaks of "a significant
  period of evolutionary time" (p. 218), "the long haul" (ibid.), "when
  the evolutionary dust has settled" (p. 219), "fine-tuned to perfection
  by natural selection" (p. 223), etc.

Mary B. Williams Checked this Premise as long ago as 1983, when she
published "The Logical Status of the Theory of Natural Selection and
Other Evolutionary Consequences," in Mario Bunge, ed., _The
Methodological Unity of Science_ (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel). She
discussed studies proposing several candidates for "the" unit of
selection and cited proposers of several: the gene, the chromosome, the
individual organism, and the population. (She might have added
candidates at levels lower than the gene, including large and small
combinations of molecules, to say nothing of individual protons,
neutrons, and electrons.) Her main point is that all these candidates
are perfectly good ones for Darwinian *processes*, since they all
interact with the environment, even if she didn't propose any
operational measures and argue which candidates qualify. By contrast,
when fitness is defined tautologically, the environment drops out of the
picture and there is no longer any connection between the theory part of
the science and the world *out there* the science is supposedly dealing
with. Recall that a science constitutes a theory part and an empirical
part, linked by semantic assumptions (correspondence rules) from the
theory to the world out there. A Darwinian *science,* then, is about any
*process* that obeys the axioms of Darwinian *theory* about differential
reproduction.

Any reader who disputes the possibility of group selection (or of
parallel processes of selection on different levels generally) should
read Williams' article, sitting "bolt upright in a hard chair," as
Professor Rutledge Vining (now age 92) used to say, and provide a
rigorous axiomatization of evolutionary principles that rules out
parallel Darwinian processes. He should watch very carefully for any
rhetorical invocation of long-run equilibria in his argument, making
sure that the axiomatization properly handles this concept. It may be,
of course, that in a specific case, there is *less* pie in a smaller
slice of a bigger pie, but this does not mean that group selection is
not operating at all. To establish that there is, in empirical fact,
always or almost always less pie, that group selection is almost always
unimportant would be extremely important. It would also involve going
*out of doors*. (2)

  (2) Addendum: I often read about genetic diversity being valuable for
  survival in times of great environmental change. I also read that
  Evolution does not care about our lifespan beyond reproductive age,
  except that Evolution will graciously allow grandparents to go on
  living if they help out with raising the grandchildren. These sound
  like group selection invocations to me. But are they and do they have
  to be?

2. Coevolution of Man and Society

Here the parallel processes are those of genes affecting behavior and
behavior affecting the environment and hence the selection of genes.
This is coevolution, which perhaps began during the Big Bang. It really
got rolling with primates, where biologists have long noted that the
brains of primates are larger than is needed to cope with the
complexities of the physical environment alone. This is a considerable
anomaly, since the brain is a great consumer of calories: the human
brain constitutes two percent of body mass but uses twelve percent of
total calories. Somehow, the calorie consuming organism must return as
much as it gives. The anomaly is resolved when it is realized that, in
addition to the physical environment, there is also the *social*
environment of other primates. Man may be the social animal, but he is
not alone. The result of selection by social, as well as physical
adaptation, has been a runaway explosion of the primate brain, which has
been only accentuated in the case of homo.

This much is not too terribly controversial. What adduces extreme
controversy is the contention that gene-cultural coevolution continues
in historical time, resulting in differences in mental capacities and
temperament among various subdivisions of man. It offends those with
religious sensibilities, who see a fundamental equality of men as
sinners before God, but it also offends those in the "Human Betterment
Industry" (the legions of job holders who attempt to manipulate the
environment--in health, education, and welfare but most importantly in
education) who want to reduce inequalities in academic and economic
outcomes. Inequalities, deeply rooted in the genes, would put severe
limits on the abilities of social planners.

And so books like Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ are
rhetorical attempt to offer explanations of the human saga that include
a number of *external* explanations but rigorously exclude all
*internal* ones. These books are not so reductive as Marx's economic
(technological, really, as noted so long ago by Frank Knight)
determinism. Indeed, they see history as the result of numerous external
factors, such as guns, germs, and steel, and also the length of the
European coastline, the pursuit of quantification, and even decisions by
early popes. What makes these books extremist is that feedback from the
environment to the genes is set at exactly zero as far as changes in the
*brain* go.

Jobs are threatened by these rearguard AntiRacist books, which ignore,
when they do not ritually denounce, a substantial body of side evidence
for evolved differences in brains. Of course, just as in the case of
group selection, where it remains possible that group selection forces
are in fact unimportant, it also remains possible that racial
differences in intelligence and temperament are unimportant. But this
needs to be established. Carl N. Degler, in _In Search of Human Nature_
(Oxford U.P., 1991), reports that he never found the "smoking gun" study
that established racial equality in brains, and I remain unaware of a
single study, no matter how poorly conducted, that came to the
*positive* conclusion on the basis of data (as opposed to negative
conclusions that criticize "racists") that there are no such
differences.

Now just how human behavior, in tandem with other environmental factors,
affected selective pressures on brains is barely into the speculative
phase. It is not implausible that harsher climates selected for more
intelligence, for example, but the underlying reason for this has not
been fully elucidated, nor does the relationship appear to apply over
the entire range, since otherwise Eskimos would have the highest
intelligence on the planet. Until inquiry is robustly encouraged, the
differential effects of different environments on brains will remain
more or less speculative.

I can offer several speculations of my own: the emergence of the
scientific mentality in Europe was the result of intense prehistoric and
early historical-period warfare that selected brains that integrated
strategy and tactics, fact and theory, or left and right hemispheres
faster than elsewhere. Social control can occur using religious rumble-
bumble, where doctrine (theory) is never put to the test (fact), but in
warfare there is no substitute for victory: brains that integrate
strategy and tactics are selected for. Warriors left scientists, as well
as more warriors, as descendants and in time spawned the Occidental
takeoff. I hypothesize that a critical mass of people preadapted to
having a scientific mind set was already in place before environmental
factors were ripe for its realization.

And I also hypothesize that the spirit of individualism had been
selected for in England long before the Industrial Revolution, in that
England was repeatedly invaded by raiders--Celts, Angles, Saxons, Danes,
Normans--who had the spirit of entrepreneurship, of seizing
opportunities and not consulting with authorities. Raiders became
traders who seize upon ways of improving the productive process. The
rest is history, though this history again had to wait for a favorable
confluence of environmental factors.

In other words, the AntiRacists are not wrong, so much as incomplete.

3. Group Strategies

Deception goes back to plants, hypocrisy to social mammals, but covering
up true motives only to those who verbalize. The first expose of a pious
priest must have come early on, and Aristotle said "you stand where you
sit," not in those words, but two millennia before Marx. Aristotle also
realized the fallacy of employing such arguments, though ad hominem
remains mankind's favorite form of argumentation, partly since it
requires so little intellectual effort. (Zero validity times small
effort is still zero: the prevalence of ad hominem argumentation must be
because it takes even greater mental effort to penetrate the fallacy.)

Students of human foolishness, however, are not concerned so much with
the truth of various religions and other means of social control nor
with the validity of arguments, as with understanding behavior. Once
again, parallel processes are at work, from the efforts of sincere
priests to promote their vision of the good to the many other mixed
motives for furthering individual or group interests. Religion explains
the world as well as generates income for priests and gets people to
behave themselves. Religion also divides the world into believers and
unbelievers. More parallel processes.

Christianity has been the religion most subject to the historian's and
the sociologist's scrutiny, but in the past century or so the
forerunners of Christianity have been examined as well. I count three
major uncoverings of parallel processes at work in Judaism. The first is
Friedrich Nietzsche's _The Antichrist_ (1887), which depicted early
Christians as the culmination of Judaism ("The Christian, that *ultima
ratio* of lying, is the Jew all over again--he is *threefold* the Jew"
(sec. 44)) as excusing their weakness on the grounds that they
voluntarily chose weakness and that doing so was a higher morality, the
"slave morality," thereby inverting morality completely. A second
presentation of a parallel process at work in Judaism is John Murray
Cuddihy, _The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the
Jewish Struggle with Modernity_ (NY: Basic Books, 1974), where he
explains the theories of these three gents as apologias for delayed
entrance of Jews into what had become a Western society based upon
civility. (And so Freud taught that inside every man is an uncivil Jew.)
And the third uncovering of a parallel process is presented in the
trilogy of Kevin MacDonald, which depicts Jewish behavior in more
sociobiological terms as a group evolutionary strategy.

All these processes (slave morality, apologies for delayed
modernization, group evolutionary strategies) operate in parallel, along
with the self-perception of Jews themselves as practitioners of their
religion and even as altruists bringing a "light to the Gentiles"
(Isaiah 49:6, but Christians claim that this promise was fulfilled in
Christ in Acts 13:47), even at the cost of great suffering. What is of
tremendous importance is to realize that everyone of these processes
operates. The urge to bring light to the Gentiles is just as real as the
pursuit of whatever group interest is needed to keep these light-
bringers intact enough to bring the light. It is *reductionism* that
nullifies any possibility of genuine goodness eking out of the world's
religions. I cannot emphasize this too strongly, esp. in the case,
lately, of Judaism.

As is usual with historical analyses (including ones involving group
selection in biology), it is the relative strengths of various factors
that should be assessed, not the reduction of many parallel processes to
a single one. I am not so far gone in cynicism that I rule out the
influence of free will and genuine goodness (unlike AntiRacists, who
rule out heredity), but neither do I think goodness is the sole
explanation. The Principle of *Pan*-Parallel Processes applies to all
processes!(3)

  (3) Mike Waller, who sent me a copy of his "Darwinism and the Enemy
  Within," _Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems_ 18.3 (1995):
  217-229, last September, might invent an explanation of Jewish
  goodness. Consider his statements: "Over evolutionary timescales those
  advantaged by sexual reproduction are not individual organisms,
  breeding groups or species; the real beneficiaries are the
  subcoalition of genes which actually define the sexual reproduction
  process (p. 222)" and that for his own comparator mechanism, "With the
  same transcending circularity, the primary evolutionary effect of the
  comparator mechanism is to perpetuate the comparator genes that define
  it" (p. 223), this mechanism being one in which an animal learns of
  its relative weakness and rolls over and dies. Mike has definitely hit
  upon real phenomena that may very well need a special comparator
  mechanism, and I thank him for his insistence, but we have no good
  description of the workings of even the subcoaltion of genes for
  sexual reproduction. And so he might find a subcoalition of genes that
  spread light to Gentiles. I only note that a gene subcoalition for
  running banking conspiracies can be invoked as readily as one for
  spreading light.

I am more interested in the collapse of empires, actually, probably
because I am a member in good standing of the American Empire but also a
member of the emerging Global Cognitive Elite race, as I have termed it
and discussed it a few months ago.(4) One factor in the collapse of
empires--the Roman one took hundreds of years to collapse!--is
demographic change, and I hypothesize that the "whispering genes within"
tell the emperor that the way to spread his genes is to enlarge his
empire, while what happens in historical times is that more alien genes
come back into the empire than go out from it. (His genes may also tell
him that he is spreading light to the barbarians.) But if a certain
complex of genes was necessary for the creation and sustenance of the
American *Republic*, then I want some assurance that the GCE race will
produce something both worthwhile and sustainable.

  (4) The elite, as defined by Murray and Herrnstein, constitutes the
  top five percent of the population, but aristocracy constitutes the
  top 1/2 percent, according to all the data I've seen, concerning
  "vons" in Germany and counts of titled families in Britain. The 1/2
  percent of a tribe of 200 is the alpha male, so there may be a
  connection. I bet everyone on this list belongs to the cognitive elite
  and most to the cognitive aristocracy, but that only the physicians
  among us belong to the financial aristocracy. Our ideas and their
  influence, I should like to think, are in the elite of elites, if not
  the aristocracy of aristocracies.

4. Concepts from Multiple Sources

I might have realized it when I read a reader on jurisprudence about
twenty-five years ago (when I realized that I agreed with the last
article I read about the essential characteristics of what constitutes
the law) or when I read an offhand remark of Richard Epstein in
_Takings_ that our law is a mixture of natural rights and
utilitarianism. I could also have realized it when Mary Tiles, in _The
Philosophy of Set Theory_, said that we want sets to be both the
foundations of mathematics and an object of mathematical study. I could
have realized it when I learned that there is no characteristic all
mammals have in common or that religions or diseases do not either. But
it is not until I got more fully into the evolutionary paradigm that I
have come to appreciate what keeps our concepts from becoming perfectly
clear.

The richness of the world, the smallness of our brains, and the effort
it takes the latter to investigate the former guarantees that the stock
of absolutely clear concepts is going to be small. The evolution of the
world means that the boundaries between concepts is going to be
arbitrary.

4.1 Mammals

But beyond the richness of the world, there is the evolution of the
world: what was once taken as defining characteristics of a mammal
(mammary glands, birth to live young, warm-bloodedness, etc.) turn out
not characterize all mammals after all, even those living today.
Mammalia is just the set of all descendants of the first mammal, meaning
that mammals are defined by their evolutionary *history*, not by any
specific *properties* as such: certain species of mammals have in fact
shed some supposedly mammalian characteristics and have reacquired those
of reptiles. Until recently, paleontologists identified the *earmark* of
mammals as having extra bones in the inner ear as the dividing line
between reptiles and mammals, but the recent find of *Joholodens
jenkinsi* in China has upset this identification (_Science_, 1999 March
26). And future discoveries will upset the classifications even more. In
short, the evolution of the world means not just a demarcation point is
arbitrary (e.g., in how much hair a man must lose to be called bald) but
relies on history as much as the genus/species classification that goes
back to Aristotle.

Beyond the richness of the world and the evolution of the world,
concepts will remain inexact because the things of the world are the
result of parallel processes. Take those extra bones in the inner ear of
mammals. From the fossil record, we know that mammals usually have one
bone on each side of the lower jaw, while reptiles have several. An
overarticulated jaw is a nuisance when trying to eat large quantities of
food, necessary for a warm-blooded animal. We don't know how warm-
bloodedness and a simplified jaw coevolved or, indeed, whether one came
long before the other, since it is not easy to determine the diets of
fossils, to say nothing of their internal temperatures. (Some mammals
are only partially warm-blooded.) But consider also that these extra
bones in the inner ear enable mammals to hear much better than reptiles.
There's an advantage here, and mammals might not have done so well if
they didn't happen to be able to listen for their prey better than
before. Live birth, typical mammalian hair, and so on, are other
features mammals that evolved in parallel, though not in every line.

4.2 Disease

Now consider diseases and their classification. Disease, of course, is a
concept that meets no exact definition but somehow represents some sort
of breakdown of "normal" processes. (In some animals, dying while giving
birth is "normal," so be careful here.) The problem is that there are
lots of ways the body can break down, and this means that a great many
diseases are classified, not according to any set of essential
characteristics but by satisfying a certain number of criteria on a
check list. The physician says you have disease so and so because you
have five of the seven criteria for it. He then gives you pill such and
such. If you had only four of the seven, he would look for other
symptoms and then, perhaps, say you had a different disease and give you
a different pill. Indeed, very often the wrong pill is the one that
works. Medicine is far more than just consulting check lists and handing
out pills, since underlying it is a real, though imperfect and evolving,
understanding of how the body works. What is going on is that the body
is a bunch of parallel processes and so are the operations of each kind
of pill.

4.3 Religion

I now jump to concepts in the human social realm and hope someone can
fill me in on societies of non-human animals but note in passing that
mental diseases are far harder to classify than bodily ones. If the
comparator theory is true, this will be the case with non-humans as
well, providing perhaps an indirect test of the viability of the
comparator idea.

Religion is another concept that eludes definition. Consider:

"If belief in the reality of powers, personal and impersonal, that are
not within the observable universe yet interfere in its affairs is what
we mean by religion, then the Levantine society was religious throughout
all of its history, and the West scarcely religious at all. On the other
hand,if by religion we mean belief in a causality that is not displayed
within the observable universe but operates on a non-physical world of
the spirit, then Western society has at times been religious but the
Levantine never. But if again we mean by religion a belief that beneath
all the complex web of the observable universe there exists a God whom
we can only dimly comprehend, but whose purpose, as well as we can
estimate it, is carried out by the normal, mechanical operation of that
universe (as each society understands what is normal and mechanical)
often in utter disregard of our dearest hopes and ideas, then both the
Levant and the West have at times been religious and at times
irreligious.

"In considering the history of the Levant it is wise to use the third
definition of religion. If the first is accepted, and we are always
under a temptation to do so because of the Bible, we are really talking
about Levantine physics, not religion, and end by deciding that the
whole Levantine world was either more in tune with religious truth than
ours has ever been or possessed from beginning to end by the most arrant
and nonsensical superstition. It was neither. It just had a different
physics. (Lawrence R. Brown, _The Might of the West_ (New York: Ivan
Obolensky, 1963, p. 145). This book, with its idea that different
civilizations possessed different notions of physics and causality,
should be Exhibit A for Howard's notion of the global brain).

The problem of defining religion is even deeper. I have searched many
discussions of world religions, and they all agree that there is no one
property in common with them all. Some, but not all (e.g., Jainism) ,
assert the existence of supra-human beings. Some, but not all, mark off
the sacred from the profane. (Certain branches of Protestantism think
the mundane world is sacred, too.) Some, but not all, have guides to
conduct. Some, but not all, have rituals. Some do not even have priests,
and only one has a systematic theology (Latin Christianity). And so on.
Indeed, Orthodox Judaism, which should be called Ortho*praxis* Judaism
is more a matter of conduct than a system of belief.

When religions arose is quite unknown, though most of the ones that are
major players on the world's scene got going during the Bronze Age. I
maintain that all of them arose as a result of parallel processes.
Sociologists have distinguished at least four social roles (5) that
religion play: a) explaining the world, b) getting people to behave
themselves, c) dividing the believer from the infidel, and d) generating
income for priests. (Certainly, in the case of a religion without
priests, the role that religion had in generating income for them was
very weak.) I know of no study that purports to come up with a better
list than mine of the roles of religion and then goes on to show how
such *features* of a religion, such as demarcating the sacred, operate
to further that role, but it is a well-known, if not always admitted,
secret that putative evolutionary explanations for how the role
something came to play in a larger system got going when evolving in the
smaller system leave a very great deal to be desired. Rhetoric rules
here, as in so many other cases.

  (5) For the distinction between function and role (of a supersystem),
  I am indebted to Martin Mahner and Mario Bunge, _Foundations of
  Biophilosophy_ (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1997), pp. 155-8.

Religion is a subject of inquiry for the same reason schizophrenia is:
the concept is not sharp, but understanding what drives one religion
helps understand, albeit less clearly, what drives another. All
religions have no one thing in common, but each one has many things in
common with each other, so much that a knowledge of religions aids
understanding Communism, National Socialism, and Objectivism.(6) Alas,
any listing of the roles that religions play would contain overlaps that
could, in some cases, be partly reduced to higher, more inclusive roles.
(Isn't dividing the world between believer and infidel a method of both
social control and a means of generating income for priests?) But only
partly: these higher roles result from parallel processes of their own.

  (6) See, for example, Jeff Walker, _The Ayn Rand Cult_ (La Salle: Open
  Court, 1999) for a study that analogizes Objectivism, not just to a
  religion but to a cult with all its purges and subpurges. I have
  argued elsewhere that Objectivism will become the next world religion.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was right in saying concepts often designate what he
called "family resemblances." What I am doing is suggesting that the
processes that drive the evolution of what is being conceptualized are
many and operate in parallel.

4.4 Morals

Morality is another concept that is the outcome of parallel processes.
Various philosophers have struggled to reduce morals to a single factor
and have come up with three grand approaches: deontological,
utilitarian, and virtue-oriented. None of these approaches is adequate.
The deontological approach is one of rules and duties (rights are duties
not to interfere), but there are too many cases where it is best to
ignore a duty to always tell the truth (e.g., when approached by an
angry man asking if you know where your wife is). The utilitarian
principle sounds nice, but attempts to get around its strictures to by,
say, decreeing that we are all happier in the long run by respecting
others' rights, while arguably true, encumbers utilitarianism with so
many hedges that the central doctrine becomes vacuous. And basing ethics
on virtue, while admirably encouraging the development of good
character, runs into problems when virtuous men disagree at what to do.

In practice, upholders of each of these three views modify them so as to
incorporate features of the other two and the reduction is only
pretended and formulistic. Richard Epstein was nearly correct in saying
that our law is a mixture of natural law rights and utilitarianism, but
he should have added that our laws, to a greater extent than is
immediately apparent, aim at encouraging virtue.

Whence cometh these three elements: rules, happiness, and virtue? I
don't know enough about psychology to give a proper account, and I
suspect that concept of happiness, as Jeremy Bentham (who invented
utilitarianism) understood it, is rather different from that conceived
by the Epicureans or by King Solomon in the Book of Proverbs. Contra
Ecclesiastes 1:9, there *are* new things under the sun. I posit no
mutations to account for such changes in our concept of happiness that
there has been and not very boldly claim that there has been as much
reemphasizing old aspects of happiness as in adding novel dimensions.
The concept of happiness is partly a function of time and place but
there are fixed structures that need investigating.(7)

  (7) This is to say that happiness, and most other concepts, are
  "socially constructed." This very sensible doctrine gets pushed to
  extremes when it gets claimed that our concepts are "nothing but"
  social constructions, an example of a reductionism that ignores
  parallel processes. At the extreme, social constructivism employs
  idealist metaphysics, since there are no material brains upon which to
  operate. This is not the first time a simple, but profound, idea,
  namely that concepts are formed in concert with other people, has been
  ballooned out to the ridiculous. It will not be the last.

Paleopsychologists face an extraordinarily challenging job making
inferences about soft brain tissue that doesn't get preserved along with
bones and thus about the parallel evolutionary processes that lead to
feeling happy. And happiness, even if it could be reduced to a single
factor, is far the only aim in life. Aiming to increase it is only one
strand in our moral thinking, too.

5. Conclusion

Reductionism fails, not just because the world out there is full of pan-
parallel processes, but because our thought processes are also tied to
our emotions, as we know from the work of Antonio Damasio. In the case
of ethics, we evolved to live by rules, to spread happiness, and to
adopt virtuous habits, all three, but all three in parallel evolution.
We can now only speculate upon the parallel emotion/cognition processes
(and the extent to which group evolutionary pressures played a role)
that lead to three principle ideas about ethics. We do know, from
centuries of philosophizing, that all attempts at reducing the notions
of the good and the right to only one of these three results in the
disconcordances I summarized above. These disconcordances are partly
cognitive but also very much partly emotional: our concepts have to feel
right, for our brains and their ideas evolved as a result of different
and parallel processes. If our emotions had a single evolutionary
source, there would be no conflicts as we philosophize about matters
that involve our emotions.

Alas, this is not the case. We will remain hypocrites, too, for exactly
the same reason. Complain about the human condition all you wish, but
realize that it results from pan-parallel processes.