A really scary thought is that evolution has been proceeding for four billion years, a time scale that is terrifyingly difficult to get one's head round. Homo sapiens is a tiny blip along that timeline. Homo sapiens is in no way a pinnacle of evolution. Evolution doesn't work towards an endgame or towards perfection and there is no force driving it. If you think about evolution differently to this, then it isn't evolution you're thinking about at all. Human beings evolved to their present state remarkably quickly in the last few tens of thousands of years, a process even more remarkable considering the long length of human generations and the low birth rate. But nothing has happened beyond the bounds of science as we understand it. We can explain human evolution reasonably simply by saying that our most recent non-human ancestors were in the right place at the right time in the right environment and that evolution made some really "good" anatomical and physiological moves (blindly, as ever, and without going into the technical nuts and bolts). The point for this thread is that there's been no sudden spectacular leap from animal-moral to human-moral. We should be happy to see animal traits that we can see moving to human traits, with plenty of overlap. After all, we're just the Naked Ape (cheers, Desmond). I'd far sooner argue that "morality," whatever it is, has evolved and been honed and finessed from animal traits, than argue in favour of religion giving us moral compass. That's utter bullshit.