Oh, so you're making the move to memetics, to cement a sociobiological reduction? Last I checked meme "theory" was a metaphor, not a scientific theory.
We evolved to use tools but also to cooperate, not just to compete. There was more cooperation than competition in Stone Age nomadic bands, and we evolved to work well in small groups, not in huge societies. That's one reason I think this kind of sociobiological explanation is what Daniel Dennett would call a greedy reduction.
I'm not entirely clear on what you were saying about pessimistic predictions; I got lost somewhere in your double and triple negatives. But you seem blasé about environmentalism. Do you dispute the scientific warnings that our expansionist, growth-based capitalist societies are largely to blame for global warming?
Again, it's special pleading to say that growth works, while restricting the context to the one that helps confirm your declaration. Growth may work in the short-term, but not so much in the long one. Why focus on the former and dismiss the latter? Why isn't that special pleading and confirmation bias? You're in the company there of compromised neoclassical economists who would speak of the looming environmental catastrophe as an "externality." All of this would be comical if it weren't also tragic.
Putting the details aside, though, I generally agree that morality is a delusion. I may have mentioned this earlier (months ago), but I had a long debate with Scott Bakker (a fantasy writer and cognitive science enthusiast who's an eliminativist regarding folk psychology) about the extent to which consciousness, freewill, and morality are delusions. I came to the conclusion that there's largely just a semantic difference between calling something an illusion and calling it an emergent property.
But yes, scientific advances do tend to undermine mass conceptions of morality and religion. I follow Nietzsche, Spinoza, and others in searching for a way to ground morality in aesthetics and thus in a stance towards the world that's comparable to the scientist's detached, objective one.
That kind of elite morality would be for enlightened folks to accompany their grim vision of the thoroughly disenchanted world that science uncovers. In short, everything would have at best an aesthetic value based on the creativity involved in generating its ordered properties.
