>>22726031>the propensity for objective evil in any given lifeformCapability for evil, sure. But does it mean it's innate? I don't think so. When I see spiders eat their siblings or even their own young, I don't think of that as "evil". Because these things are just turning on each other when food is limited, and it's a kind of natural population control. I.e. if there was enough prey then they wouldn't bother to hunt each other. Also I don't count it as evil because I don't necessarily think the spiders are even necessarily aware they're eating relatives. These kind of creatures only have hundreds of thousands of neurons and while they demonstrate complex behaviour like ability to make a web, it's "hard coded" so to speak.
Where things shift into evil territory is when you know it's your kin, and you do things like murder for the fun of it (not to survive). But I think that ultimately these kind of behaviours are self correcting in the long run. Because how do you scale this up into millions of co-operating voluntarily?
What I mean is this, think of a species like an organism itself. The cells are people or some other higher life form. Organisms can get things like cancer or infections that can kill it. So over time, evolution favours those that can resist such things. In that sense, I see evil like that, it's kind of behaviour that's beneficial for a small group (just like how cancer cells do well) but it will ultimately either get beaten by the host or die when the host itself dies (from not being able to support it).
I don't think you can get to a certain level of civilisation (especially the advanced space faring kind) unless evil itself is at least under control. Maybe there are psychopathic individuals that have no fear but they're used in the same way we use drones. They won't be given a lot of intelligence, and are good order followers, to function like white blood cells. Which have simple programming to kill things that are abnormal/foreign.
