Announcement List for the Virginia Atheists & Agnostics

[Erik Pomrenke <>]

Oops! I forgot to mention that John's talk is this Friday, April 11th!

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:21 AM, Erik Pomrenke <> wrote:

Hello VAA!

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who came out for elections last week! Unlike a lot of clubs that have larger institutional structure, VAA really is all about its members, and you guys what keeps our club going. Your elected officers next year will be:

President: Victoria Gabriel

Vice President: Scott Newton

Events Officer: Kylie Grow

~~~Congrats!~~~

This week will have a slightly different structure than normal. This Thursday at 7PM, we will be meeting by the whispering wall (the courtyard in between Brown, Newcomb, and Monroe) to flyer for our upcoming event, Ask An Atheist Day. Your guys' help will be really appreciated, and we will be hanging out afterwards!

For our actual meeting this week, we will be hosting former VAA President and UVA Alumnus, John Kubinski, in New Cabell 207 at 6 PM.

A description of his talk follows:

Morality is a species-wide trait that "comes naturally" to human beings. To explain this, an evolutionary analysis is in order to uncover how morality might be adaptive. However, morality immediately poses an evolutionary puzzle in that moral rules frequently require individuals to behave in ways apparently contrary to their fitness. 

Though much intellectual progress has been made regarding the evolution of basic moral sentiments like fairness and cooperativity, adherence to moral norms outside these domains still remains mysterious. Particularly troubling is the fact that many moral (deontological) rules are arbitrary and vary across cultures. My talk will attempt to account for this troubling fact, and provide an answer to the question: why do biologically based moral-cognitive systems mobilize themselves in the service of arbitrary, culturally-transmitted norms?

I will put forward the claim that human beings adopt moral rules in order to avoid costly conflicts. In the course of human affairs, conflicts arise frequently, and often generate "opposing sides" via social alliances. Moral rules allow for the defusing of such conflicts by specifying a winner in advance. This allows all possible alliance members to choose the same "winning side," or, simply, to coordinate, instead of being dragged into a two-sided war. After exploring this adaptive logic, I will show how the need to have coordination rules, which let everyone know which side to take in a conflict, can shed light on phenomena such as rituals, gender policing, and political revolution.   

Erik W. Pomrenke

UVa 2014

German Literature 

President of VAA

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Erik W. Pomrenke

UVa 2014

German Literature 

President of VAA