Even in a pointless universe, pointless happiness and pleasures are surely preferable to pointless suffering. - Steve Stewart-Williams

Whether a trait is natural or unnatural is irrelevant to the question of whether it’s good. Moral worth should be judged not in terms of the naturalness of a trait, but rather in terms of how that trait impacts the wellbeing of everyone affected by it. Thus, violence is natural but bad, medicine unnatural but good.

If men in our evolutionary past did not invest in offspring, they would not have evolved strict mate preferences and thus women would be as drab as peahens. The fact that women are not as drab as peahens suggests a long history of male mate choice, which in turn suggests a long history of pair bonding and high male parental investment.

Certainly, the human-animal distinction is still workable; after all, we rarely make errors in assigning entities to one category or the other. But after Darwin, the distinction suddenly seems arbitrary – as arbitrary as the equally workable distinction between, say, turtles and non-turtles.