Improving as a Species

With all the anxiety and sense of foreboding at loose in the world,  it's refreshing to look back and see how far we've come.

Believe it or not,  we're improving as a species.

Appreciating Our Moral and Mental Development by Arnold Kling.

"In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and was slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized."

As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence."
-- Steven Pinker
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In reality, the human race is changing. The physical improvements in humans have been emphasized by Robert Fogel in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death. He coined the term "technophysio evolution" to describe the phenomenon. He points out, for example, that people have become so much larger and active over the past three hundred years that today's human could not survive on the diet of our recent ancestors.

I would argue that the increases in human longevity, size, and health have been paralleled by increases in cognitive and moral reasoning. One of the most dramatic illustrations of the cognitive improvement is the Flynn Effect, which demonstrates that average IQ has been rising steadily in many countries for most of this century. Average IQ's in Britain may be more than two standard deviations higher than they were a hundred years ago, which says that the average citizen today would have been in the top 5 percent of intelligence early in the 20th century.
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On the other hand, there is also plenty of evidence that is inconsistent with moral improvement. Examples that come to mind include vulgarity and violence portrayed in movies and video games. Clearly, the abuse of civilians by terrorists is not a sign of moral improvement.

Still, I suspect that if one could examine every human interaction and attach a measure of the moral reasoning involved in that interaction, the average moral "score" would be rising. To put it another way, I would conjecture that on average we see a higher proportion of interactions that follow the Golden Rule today than we did 20 years ago, which in turn is higher than the proportion 50 years ago, and so on.

Robert Godwin, aka Gagdad Bob  thinks along the same lines.

my belief that humans have actually continued evolving over the centuries, and that most people and cultures were impossibly cruel, barbaric, and frankly crazy by today's standards. This is an unpopular notion because it doesn't appeal to either traditionalists on the right or contemporary liberals on the left. Traditionalists don't like it because it seems contrary to the idea that human beings were created by God with an unchanging nature: a man is a man is a man, whether 2500 years ago or today. And liberals don't like it for reasons of multiculturalism and moral relativism.