Mike, you wrote last week: Whoa!

The contemporary, reductionist understanding of Darwinian natural selection has no place for this; in that mechanism, it is the strongest and most adaptable — not the most moral, not the defenders of the rights of the weak — who survive.

That is a gross misrepresentation of modern biology. I really can’t let you get away with that.

The evolution of moral behavior has been an active field for over 40 years, since William Hamilton’s 1964 papers. It has all been extensively explained to interested nonscientists – most issues of the New York Times Science section has something related. Or you could read up on the Prisoner’s Dilemma in Chapter 12 of Richard Dawkins’ excellent book The Selfish Gene. (The chapter title is “Nice Guys Finish First.”)

Altruism and co-operation in social animals, including this one, are perfectly explicable by the laws of biology – what you call the “reductionist understanding of Darwinian natural selection.” (I guess the Moon is maintained in her orbit by “the reductionist understanding of Newtonian gravitation.”)

This isn’t even God of the Gaps; the gap in question here is pretty well filled. Supernatural agents are no more required for explaining moral behavior than they are for explaining earthquakes (for which the wrath-of-Poseidon model is a dead letter, I’m afraid).