I heard a saying once that you can teach someone to be good at any given skill, but you can't teach them to have a good conscience.

However, I think it is primarily learned from infancy from our parents, who can be good or bad teachers/examples.  And its most difficult to unlearn.  You can see that on Dr. Phil every day.

My dog knows when he has done something bad, and expresses it pitifully well, lol.  So, I imagine a kid has no problem with it.

Conscience can be learned. If it turns out that there is a human gene for compassion, then it could also be hereditary.

I also think that conscience is something we experience in mystical experience. Or, to de-mystify mystical experience, in deep right-brain experience. Such an experience is almost universally reported as an experience of unity, a feeling of oneness with everyone and everything. Unitive love, conscience, consciousness and compassion are the inevitable outcomes of such experience.

I think 'conscience' or moral compass is primarily learned.   Can't comment on the pooping privacy of the 8 month old tho!

If "conscience" were hereditary, everybody would have one.  They don't.  So it's not.

I don't mean to say that conscience as a whole is hereditary, but that we could have predispositions to certain things. My family has a long history of alcohol abuse which can be passed down.

I don't think it's a genetic thing. It seems like our experiences have a lot to do with how we view things morally. Classical conditioning can show us the consequences of certain actions, which can help us determine which actions are the best to do incertain situations. Our experiences can also give us wisdom, which we can then use to update our moral opinions. Each and every person has their own personal beliefs about ethical issues. Ethics is a philosophy and therefore requires reason. Morality is, therefore, a rational process.

However, there is still that feeling that we all get in our guts that tells us what we are supposed to do. When we screw up, we feel guilt. When we help others, we feel gratification. These emotions do not have any rational basis to them; they are intuitive and happen unconsciously. Some may call these feelings a message from God, because we do not have any way to control these feelings. That is debatable, but what is not debatable is that these feelings give us insight into the morality of our actions. Therefore, morality is also an emotional process.

So morality has two layers; an emotional layer and a rational layer. The emotional layer is beyond conscious control but acts intuitively based on conscious experience. The rational layer is based on personal experience wisdom and opinion, and usually requires time in order to develop. Now, the question is, which one do we listen to? I would argue that both layers should be listened to and taken into consideration when deciding how to act. Sometimes both will say the same thing, which can make a decision easy. However, other times they will conflict. When they do conflict, one has to make the choice of which is more important to listen do based on what the situation is. Sometimes emotional intelligence can have more merit and other times rational intelligence has more merit. It is up to the individual to decide which side has more merit in each case.

Human behavior, including behavior classified as conscience-driven, has one purpose....  to increase our probability of survival.  And so the predisposition to behave with a conscience must be a heritable trait.

This assumes that behaving conscientously has an advantage for survival under the circumstances.  Pooping remotely from a group would definitely be advantageous to the group. It shouldn't be surprising that the behaviour is natural.

All behavior, including the ability to learn to express an advantageous behavior must be genetically based and inheritable.

What else could it be?

LL&P

Spock

Hi Spock,

As I said, conscience could be rooted in the feeling and insight of the universal at-one-ment that we experience in deep meditation, in mystical experience, and intuitively.

Well this article is interesting. Ever hear of Lamarckism?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/180103?gt1=43002

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926641.500-rewriting-darwin-the-new-nongenetic-inheritance.html

Very interesting! I'd like to hear what someone with more of a grasp on evolutionary science than I has to say. I don't beleive this theory takes away from evolution, rather adds, as the writer suggests a paralell method of genetic inheritance.

Is conscience like the alcohol gene ... that we can turn on by behaviour patterns? Then there is the hardened soul that shuts out everything as a mana of self centered desire ... an overblown primal ID?

As said in East of Eden ... you have a choice, you may or may not! Do you have the teaching of intellect to know that you will be responsible for your actions in the infinite case? Now what is infinite reverence? No mortal seems to be able to answer that one! Is that generally stupid?

Perhaps that is why the undefinable soul tells us we are borne as children of God ... the lesser of evils or just wee daemons on the other side of all that coming and going of flighty creatures doin battle? Sea mon of the m'neumonic spash! It is a confused pool that starts the whole thing.

Is the mind related to the physical half ... or perhaps inseparable as defined by creation ... ad joining powers?

Yes. It's a complete joke. The theory suggests that giraffes have long necks because they used to stretch their necks in order to reach the tall trees. It suggests that if you drop a naked mole rat into a tundra that it will grow a bushy fur coat and survive. The Darwinian model actually makes sense.

KR, did you all of both articles? It seems it has found new interest in the scientific community because of  new information, even though it has been around since before Darwin.

I read the New Scientist article. I can see how they are modifying the theory to be more 'Lamarkian' but it is still far from his actual theory, which is still going to be considered a joke. The only thing that makes this similar to his theory is that now we are considering that environmental factors can influence DNA structure. Lamark's examples of this were far too extreme to be at all realistic though. The theory also looks like it will probably remain primarily Darwinistic.

Time will tell. Once we become entrenched, it's hard to look elsewhere or revisit other areas.

It's all interesting to me.

Conscience is learned or hereditary?

We know and accept that the color of the skin, curliness of the hair, color of the eyes, height and weight have all been inherited. We accept this because we can visually see and be satisfied about this quickly.

Through doctors we also know that Vision disorders, Blood pressure, diabetics, Cardiac problems all have some hereditary chances. Those are the diseases that medicine as a science so far is able to identify.

It takes so long to prove that something is inherited because you have to compare data of 3 or 4 generations and if you go back to the past, we may not have data to really confirm. Data acquisitions have started happening only in the last 50 years or so and hence it takes a few more generations to prove that many more characteristics are inherited.

My hypothesis is, when skin cells, hair growth pattern, retina cells, etc are all inherited, why not the brain cells. Next question does the brain cell already hold any information when we are born or is genetically message transferred from parents to children on to the brain. Brain is complex and should have multiple layers of memory which are ready for action, deeper ( subconscious), further deep ( sub-sub-conscious), further further deep ( sub sub sub)... this goes on. We donot know how many layers or the layers are themselves not fixed and may vary from person to person. The deepest layers of memory, may be the pattern of brain cells, its ability to process and store certain type of data are all determined by hereditary nature. For example if for 2 or 3 generations if we are a Mathematics professor, our children will have brain cells developed to work on Mathematics quickly than other persons cell and hence it will help the next gen child to learn Maths faster than others.

I have some practical experience... My son is 11 years old and I am 35. My son is very inquisitive and keeps questioning every one exactly the same way I was at that age. My parents say that my sone is behaving exactly the same way as I used to behave. My son play cricket and he is good in certain strokes exactly the same ones I have been good at. I have not taught him cricket and neither has he seen my playing. There are many more similarities i have analysed in his behaviour which is similar to mine at that age. None of those he could watched and learned from me. Even i might have acquired this from my parents and grand parents.

Secondly, Conscience is not purely genetic. Only the deepest layers are genetically stored and the top layers are all the experiences. learned during our life time. But supposing we keep doing the same thing or we put it in our subconscious mind it will get deeper and deeper and i think may be passed on to our children to some extent.

We may be by hereditary short natured, but with excercise we can improve our height. By hereditary we can be obese, but by control or excercise we can reduce be slimmer. When we can control the hereditary characterics of visually identifiable things we can also control the conscience part be what we learn and practice. But it is superficial. As we grow old the individual learning will play more than the hereditary characteristics because they thoughts experienced will get stored deeper and deeper and deeper. Once the hereditary thoughts are overwritten we are more with self developed thoughts. But still some amount of hereditary information will lie recessive which will spring in the next gen.

Feel free to contradict and correct me if  I am wrong.