Biologist's Mistake
Updated 2026-08-22
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
The biologist's mistake names the inference from evolutionary success to moral justification: because a behavior spreads genes, it is taken to be right. It is the evolutionary form of the naturalistic fallacy identified by G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica (1903), and it inherits the is-ought gap described by David Hume. The error is not in using biology to explain behavior, but in letting a descriptive account of why a trait persisted stand in for a normative argument about what should be done. Evolution explains what is; it does not legislate what ought to be.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Split the claims: separate the question of why a behavior exists from whether it is justified. - Demand the bridge: ask which premise turns the evolutionary fact into a moral conclusion. - Restore the layers: check what culture, institutions, and choice add beyond genetic explanation.
Anchor fast decisions
The inference works rhetorically because explanation and justification share a vocabulary of reasons, so the slide from one to the other is hard to see. Evolution supplies a standard, reproductive success, that is local and descriptive; ethics requires a standard that is general and prescriptive. Substituting one for the other swaps the criterion mid-argument while the surface stays coherent, and reductionism reinforces this by collapsing cultural and institutional causes into a single genetic layer.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacyverified
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