I'd rather stay agnostic on whether or not this is the case; we have very little reliable data on culture under non-marginal paleolithic conditions. I haven't heard of any conclusive skeletal evidence for war in that era (murder yes, war no), but this isn't my field so I could easily be missing some.

This paper argues that coalitionary killings were rare among hunger-gatherer societies, and that warfare as we currently understand it did not come into exitence until the rise of agriculture and sedantism, because prior to those develpments, the average hunter-gatherer band simply didn't have enough accumulated material wealth to make the benefit of raids into another band's territory outweigh the risk of getting ambushed by unseen defenders with projectile weapons who know the territory better than you.

However, the development of the throwing spear, used in conjunction with ambush hunting techniques, ushered in an era in which the enhanced lethality of weaponry amplified the costs of assessment errors, and the necessity of movement also placed intruders at a comparative disadvantage with respect to both detection and assessment. Moreover, asymmetrical detection rather than a numerical imbalance of power determined the outcome of hostile encounters. This reconfiguration of the decisive factors in lethal conflict not only raised the stakes (or potential costs) for would-be aggressors but also rendered the benefit of intercommunity dominance unattainable. Because superior numbers were not invariably decisive in encounters between hunting parties, an initial success would neither materially reduce the stakes for aggressors in subsequent attacks nor make it possible to freely encroach on the territory of a neighboring group that had sustained a casualty. Under these circumstances, aggression resulted in stalemate and a condition analogous to a war of attrition rather than territorial gain.

These developments marked a major turning point in the evolution of lethal intergroup violence and in the character of interrelations between neighboring groups. Although fitness continued to be related to territory size (for food-limited populations in occupied environments), selective circumstances no longer favored aggression as a means of achieving territorial gain. [...] In other words, the development of the throwing spear altered the means of production as well as the social relations of production, distribution, and consumption within groups in fundamental ways that also transformed intergroup relations and influenced subsequent hominid evolution.

Strictly speaking they don't need to be; they "just" need to be common enough among human cultures for that to exert distinguishable selection pressure, and successful enough that the groups that come up with the idea don't end up autodarwinating. Though the latter is group selection pressure of a kind, too.

I'd rather stay agnostic on whether or not this is the case; we have very little reliable data on culture under non-marginal paleolithic conditions. I haven't heard of any conclusive skeletal evidence for war in that era (murder yes, war no), but this isn't my field so I could easily be missing some.

I don't get the flippant exclusion of group selection.

To the best of my knowledge, humans are the only species that has been exposed to continuous group selection events over hundreds of thousands of years, and I would argue that we've gotten very, very good at the activity as a result.

I'm referring, of course, to war. The kind that ends in extermination. The kind that, presumably, humans practiced better than all of our close hominid relatives who are all conspicuously extinct as of shortly after we spread throughout the world.

This is why I'm not much buying the 'tribes don't die often enough to allow group selection to kick in' argument - obviously, a whole lot of tribes are quite dead, almost certainly at the hands of humans. Even if the tribe death-rate right now is not that high, the deaths of entire hominid species to homo sapiens implies that it has been high in the past. And even with a low tribe death rate, replace 'tribe-murder' with 'tribe-rape' and you still have a modest group selection pressure.

So I don't know why you're talking about the impact of individual evolution in morality. Any prospective species whose morality was guided primarily by individual concerns, rather than the humans-will-rape-and-or-murder-us group concerns, probably got raped-and-or-murdered by a tribe of humans, the species we know to be the most efficient group killing machines on earth.

Under this paradigm - the one where we analyze human psychology as something that made us efficient tribe-murderers - sociopathy makes sense. Indeed, it's something I would argue we all have, with a complicated triggering system built to try to distinguish friend from foe. Full-on sociopathy would probably be to our war-sociopathy as sickle-cell anemia is to malaria resistance; a rare malfunction of a useful trait ('useful' in the evolutionary sense of 'we tribe-murdered all the hominids that didn't have it'). And that's not counting sociopaths who are that way because they simply got so confused that their triggering system broke, no genetics required.

We can't give our senses of honor or altruism a free pass in this analysis, either. If our universal sociopathy is war-sociopathy, then our universal virtue is peace-virtue, also dictated by trigger mechanisms. What we describe as virtue and the lack of it co-evolved in an environment where we used virtue in-group, and outright predation out-group. Groups that were good at both succeeded. Groups that failed at the first were presumably insufficiently efficient at group murder to survive. Groups that failed at the second were murdered by groups good at the second.

Practically the only individual adaptation I can see in that situation is the ability to submit to being conquered, or any other non-fatal-and-you-still-get-to-breed form of humiliation, which might mean you survive while they kill the rest of your tribe. But too much of even that will reduce in-group cohesion: A tribe can only take so many prisoners of a species whose members can express (and as you argue in belief-in-belief, even internalize) the opposite of their actual beliefs, such as "I don't want to murder you in your sleep as vengance for killing my tribe and enslaving me".

Fair enough, but I think that the example of mathematics was brought forth because of the thing mathematicians primarily do.

So we could rather say that "the scientific method" refers to the things scientists (and mathematicians) do when there are no proofs, which is to test ideas through experiment, and "the mathematical method" refers to proving things.

Of course, you don't have to draw this distinction if you prefer not to; if you claim that both of these things should be called "the scientific method" then that's also fair. But I'm pretty sure that the "Science vs. Bayes" dilemma refers only to the first thing by "Science", since "Bayes" and "the mathematical method" don't really compete in the same playing field.

There is a difference between checking the internal consistency of a simulation and gathering evidence. Scientists who use simulation calibrate the simulation with empirical measurements, and they generally are running the simulation to make predictions that have to be tested against yet more empirical measurement.

Mathematicians are just running a simulation in a vacuum. Its a very different thing.

When scientists in any field can prove something with just logic, they do. Evidence is the tiebreaker

What is an example of something a scientist can prove with 'just logic'?

When scientists in any field can prove something with just logic, they do.

I would say that when they do this, they are doing mathematics instead of science. (By the time that scientists can prove something with logic, they necessarily have a mathematical model of their field.)

When scientists in any field can prove something with just logic, they do. Evidence is the tiebreaker

You have it backwards. Evidence is the only thing that counts. Logic is a tool to make new models, not to test them. Except in mathematics, where there is no way to test things experimentally.

Here is the difference: the superstring theory is a reasonably good mathematical model which predicts a spacetime with 10 or 11-dimensions on purely mathematical grounds. It also predicts that particles should come in pairs (quarks+squarks). Despite its internal self-consistency, it's not a good model of the world we live in. Whether mathematicians use the scientific method depends on your definition of the scientific method (a highly contested issue on the relevant wikipedia page). Feel free to give your definition and we can go from there.

If I could show you an example of mathematicians running ongoing computer simulations in order to test theories (well. Test conjectures for progressively higher values), would that demonstrate otherwise to you?

This happens, but the conclusion is different. No matter how many cases of an infinite-case conjecture I test, it's not going to be accepted as proof or even particularly valid evidence that the conjecture is true. The point of doing this is more to check if there are any easy counter-examples, or to figure out what's going on in greater detail, but then you go back and prove it.

Mathematicians do not test their models against Nature, the ultimate arbiter, only for self-consistency and validity within their own framework. Math will be the same in many different possible worlds. Of course, on their less-sane days they engage in philosophical debates about which axioms are right.