Recent work in the fields of evolutionary ethics and moral psychology appears to be converging on a single empirically- and evolutionary-based science of morality or ethics. To date, however, these fields have failed to provide an adequate conceptualisation of how culture affects the content and distribution of moral norms. This is particularly important for a large class of moral norms relating to rapidly changing technological or social environments, such as norms regarding the acceptability of genetically modified organisms. Here we suggest that a science of morality/ethics can benefit from adopting a cultural evolution or gene-culture coevolution approach, which treats culture as a second, separate evolutionary system that acts in parallel to biological/genetic evolution. This cultural evolution approach brings with it a set of established theoretical concepts (e.g. different cultural transmission mechanisms) and empirical methods (e.g. evolutionary game theory) that can significantly improve our understanding of human morality.

中文翻译：

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伦理、进化和文化。

最近在进化伦理学和道德心理学领域的工作似乎正在集中在单一的以经验和进化为基础的道德或伦理学上。然而，迄今为止，这些领域未能就文化如何影响道德规范的内容和分布提供充分的概念化。这对于与快速变化的技术或社会环境相关的一大类道德规范尤其重要，例如关于转基因生物可接受性的规范。在这里，我们建议道德/伦理科学可以从采用文化进化或基因-文化协同进化的方法中受益，这种方法将文化视为与生物/基因进化平行的第二个独立的进化系统。