Of course it's degrading, but it's true and it's the world we live in. It's okay if you want to put your hands over your ears and keep your eyes closed, but don't expect others to do the same, and don't be surprised when they have a better grip of reality.
Science is observational. It doesn't give us rules we must follow, it describes the behaviour of things in the universe.
So if someone* says, "People do selfish things, that's science," true!
But if they also say, "Therefore, it's ok to kill your neighbour and take their house, see all of recorded history, colonialism, &c." I stop them. Science teaches us that people kill each other and take their land.
But science also teaches us that people coöperate and build rockets to Mars. Science is not prescriptive, and with respect to morality and ethics, science teaches us that there are many different strategies that people use to accomplish their goals, some of which may result in the replication of the information encoded in their genes.
Selfishness "Just is?" Yes.
Therefore "______ is ok and we must accept it?" No.
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* I am not putting these words in your mouth or arguing with you, just picking up where your statement left off.
Science has concluded that some human genotypes are, by scientific standards "lesser" than others. This can be - and has been - used by atheists and religionists alike to justify crimes against those people. Without a moral sense there is little holding back inhumanity from consuming itself. Science hasn't found a gene for morality, and doesn't seem to be on the hunt for it. So we therefore need our cultures to help us prevent calamity - which would require, by necessity, ignoring the scientists clamouring to explain from their pulpit that some humans are simply lesser than others, and "they have the science to prove it".
All I have to say about concluding that some genotypes are lesser by "scientific standards" can be summed up in the following HaHaOnlySerious joke that I have been telling my children from the time they could understand English:
"Humans are the greatest species of Life on Earth, according to all of the metrics that humans have chosen to measure greatness."
Science also tells me that insects are better than people, if I pick a different metric. I suspect we agree on this.
No but the fact that we have morality (and the possibility that other animals do not) can be explained via evolution. In reality probably many genes contribute in a complicated way to making us social animals.
I think the fact that Dawkins has become the very thing he so violently resists - a violent, intolerant fundamentalist who brooks no further questioning of his own authoritarian narrative - is evidence enough that there is still much, much to be discovered about the way life works. His is a cultural view, and we know for a fact that all culture is a lie which must be re-told in order to persist.
The more the human mind finds answers, the more questions it reveals - such is the nature of an infinite universe and our struggle to perceive it. If "God" doesn't exist we humans sure do spend a lot of time attempting to become one. "God" may not be a "he" sitting "on a cloud", but may indeed just be the New Question beyond every Old Answer. This fact seems to be rabidly overlooked by the Dawkins cult, which prefers to define God in its own, limited terms, in order to find fault in their chosen pariah cultures.
The jury is still out. On a scale of 1 to 7, 0.1 is just enough uncertainty to allow for yet more unanswered questions .. Dawkins, himself, has at least a little of the humility required to admit that.
Yeah, well maybe God is the sum total of everything, including your much-despised woo woo .. which, in my opinion, is the opposite of the kinds of totalitarian schools of thought that threaten our cultures, time and again.
Without the woo and whimsy and make-believe, what have we got left in our cultures? If we kill religion we may as well kill theatre and literature and all the other things which require this unmeasurable substance in order to be viable ..
I can't speak for what your parent poster is trying to say, but I can tell you what I mean when I say the same thing.
Let me use a specific example. I often say that capitalism is terrible for workers. Yet I work for a capitalist company that is--in my opinion--quite good to its workers.
Being a "realist" has told me that when looking for a job, I should be careful to avoid toxic cultures, exploitative management, and being underpaid relative to whatever I consider the fair market value of my labour.
But being a realist has also told me that toxicity, exploitation, and stinginess are unevenly distributed, and therefore it is a wise thing to shop around and negotiate for what I want.
I would NEVER say, "Toxicity is just how all businesses work. Demeaning and bullying people is just how company cultures are. Exploiting workers is what businesses do. If you can manipulate someone into working such long hours their health suffers, good for you. And negotiating is impossible, all companies push their workers around."
Being a realist means acknowledging what is in the universe, but it also means acknowledging that the universe contains variety and that almost everything is unevenly distributed.
