[Big Papa Goat]

Morality here clearly has to be understood as it has generally been understood throughout most of human history; doing good for your friends and harm to your enemies, which I guess is more like justice than morality as such, but still I think that's basically what we're talking about here. That kind of morality (=justice) is basically advantageous for any particular group; it's just that the concept of populations as a unit that is selected for in terms of biological evolution is tough to grasp. The way I always saw it was that the populations provided something like a context for the evolution of different genes within the population, but I never really got that far along in biology I suppose.

You raise a good point in general about the complexity of gene expression, I guess if we can't really know how genes get expressed that could say a lot about how much we can know about how genes get selected for. Makes talking about evolutionary biology and behaviour pretty complicated for sure.

As for kahljorn; I think what we're talking about here is a descriptive account of how 'morality' came to be, we're not trying to justify anything on the basis of it's origins, which I think is what you mean by the genetic fallacy. Like I said earlier, the morality we're talking about is doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies, not a philosophically sophisticated morality, but certainly a prominent one in human history. It is an opinion about what is right and wrong whose origins can be traced to evolutionary biology, tracing the origins of something is not the same as justifying it by those origins. But that doesn't mean we can just forget about nature and say that it's all just meaningless epiphenomena, the nature (=origins) of human things (like morality) is still important to understanding and dealing with them. Like this bad morality that evolution gave us; just because Plato showed what was wrong with it about 2000 years ago (and any reasonable person can see what's wrong with it on their own anyway) doesn't mean that it's gone away, so living with the biological reality of (biologically) evolved morality remains important.

I've been rambling, so let me just get to the point: being gay is gross.