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quote:
ORIGINAL: defiantbadgirl
a conscience
Close, but technically, a certain amount of respect for group fitness is basic mammalian behavior - intraspecies violence tend to be self limiting: even the victor will eventually end up maimed and will find their reproductive fitness and potential compromised, and the trait will be discouraged via natural selection, thus dominence and submission displays, which are technically reptilian, such is their utility in maintaining a healthy breeding population overall, and part of an older set of traits wired into the limbic system.
A conscience then, is a mechanism to promote group fitness, and preserve your own reproductive potential, and represents and advance over reptilian behavior, as it facilitates co-operative efforts, and supports K reproductive strategies, where the young require more care.
Oddly, the lack of a conscience is a thing that is largely only evident in humans under ordinary circumstances, that's probably because it's an adaptation to stress: malnutrition or lack of maternal care can result in certain changes in the brain that short circuit group fitness traits, like conscience - the organism becomes more aggressive, presumably because it needs to be more aggressive to get it's needs met, it sort of reboots to a more reptilian mode, and these changes may be heritable - mice for instance, will kill and eat each other if they're starving, and psychopathy in rats has been demonstrated to be heritable for up to Twenty generations - it does tend to lower overall intelligence, so much for psychopathic genius's, they don't tend to live as long and are more likely to develop Alzheimer's, etc.
Not all psychopaths will eat you, of course, the risk of being maimed or killed themselves is often enough of a mechanism to convince them to go through the motions of upholding general group values w/regard to violent behavior, and in fact, a culture often finds psychopathic traits valuable: physical courage, high tolerance to pain, etc., what's called psychopathic talent.
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RE: What makes someone human? - 
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