Thou Shalt Not Kill, Said The Man to The Lion

The reality is that human societies across the globe—separated by oceans and millennia—independently arrived at very similar moral “baselines” without a book with commands, supposedly from a deity. Long before the Hebrew Decalogue was codified, other civilizations recognized that for a group to survive, certain behaviors had to be strictly regulated. Legal and moral codes were developed in different regions without any influence from the biblical Ten Commandments.

The Code of Ur-Nammu (Sumer)

Dating back to roughly 2100–2050 BCE, this is the oldest known surviving legal code. Written in the Sumerian language, it predates the biblical commandments by centuries.

• The Parallel: Like the commandments against murder and theft, this code established specific punishments for these crimes.
• The Nuance: While the Bible often uses “thou shalt not,” the Sumerian code used an “If… then…” structure (e.g., If a man commits a murder, that man must be killed).

The Code of Hammurabi (Babylon)

Perhaps the most famous ancient legal text, enacted around 1754 BCE in Babylon.

• The Parallel: It features strict prohibitions against perjury (bearing false witness), theft, and adultery.
• The Nuance: It is famous for the lex talionis (law of retaliation), or “an eye for an eye,” a concept that also appears in later Hebrew law.

The 42 Affirmations of Ma’at (Ancient Egypt)

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a soul entering the afterlife had to recite the “Negative Confessions” to prove they lived a righteous life.

• The Parallel: These include: “I have not stolen,” “I have not slain men,” “I have not lied,” and “I have not committed adultery.”
• The Nuance: These were framed as declarations of purity to the gods rather than commands given by a god to the living, though they functioned as a moral blueprint for Egyptian society.

The Edicts of Ashoka (India)

Following his conversion to Buddhism in the 3rd century BCE, Emperor Ashoka inscribed moral reformations on pillars throughout India.

• The Parallel: He emphasized “Dharma,” which included honoring parents and elders, truthfulness, and prohibitions against killing living beings.
• The Nuance: While the Ten Commandments focus heavily on the relationship between man and a single God, Ashoka’s edicts focused on social harmony and religious tolerance.

Why These Rules Evolve Naturally

The “overlap” between these cultures isn’t a coincidence or a case of cosmic plagiarism. Rather, these rules are evolutionary necessities. Here is why groups naturally develop them for survival and control:

Reduction of Internal Friction

For a hunter-gatherer tribe or an early city-state to survive, it must minimize internal conflict. If members of a group are constantly killing one another or stealing resources, the group weakens and becomes vulnerable to external threats. Laws against murder and theft are, at their core, stability protocols.

Trust and Reciprocal Altruism

Social animals rely on “reciprocal altruism”—the idea of “I’ll help you now, and you’ll help me later.” This system collapses if individuals lie or cheat. Rules against “bearing false witness” or breaking contracts ensure that information shared within the group is reliable, which is vital for coordinated hunting, farming, and defense.

Resource and Genetic Management

Rules regarding adultery and property (theft/coveting) often serve to manage resources and reproductive certainty. In many ancient societies, maintaining clear lines of inheritance and family units was essential for the orderly transfer of land and wealth, preventing “blood feuds” between families.

Group Cohesion through Ritual

The “religious” half of the Ten Commandments (Sabbath, no other gods) serves a different evolutionary purpose: Group Identity. By enforcing shared rituals and a common “authority figure” (a deity or a King), a group creates a “sacred canopy” that distinguishes “us” from “them,” making the group more disciplined and easier to mobilize.

In short, morality didn’t just drop out of the sky; it grew out of the ground. We are a social species, and “Thou shalt not kill” is simply a very effective way to ensure there is still a “thou” left to help you survive the winter.

When The Rules Don’t Apply

The “Thou shalt not kill” rule isn’t a universal biological law, but rather a specific adaptation for social species that rely on high-level cooperation.

To understand why the lion and other apex predators don’t have this “moral” hurdle, we have to look at how evolution solves the problem of staying alive.

The same way we eat other animals that are outside of our species, other animals usually do the same. For example, Lions rarely fight to the death with members of their own pride. They use posturing, roaring, and non-lethal swiping to settle disputes. Killing a pride-mate is maladaptive because you lose a hunter or a protector. Infanticide, however, exists in the animal kingdom.

When a new male lion takes over a pride, he often kills the existing cubs. While this looks like “murder” to us, from a cold, evolutionary standpoint, it is a calculated reproductive strategy – the new male wants to sire his own offspring. As long as a lioness is nursing, she won’t go into estrus (she can’t get pregnant). By killing the cubs, the male forces the female back into fertility within days.

When a lion eats a human, it’s interspecific (between species). To the lion, the human isn’t a “neighbor” to be loved; it’s a high-protein mobile resource. A lion “murdering” a gazelle is no more a moral failing than a human “murdering” a carrot or a cow.

For a social primate like a human, empathy is a survival tool. It allows us to predict what others are thinking and build alliances. For an apex predator, too much empathy for prey would be an evolutionary dead end. A lion that feels “guilty” about the gazelle’s family will starve, fail to reproduce, and its “guilt genes” will vanish from the gene pool.

Naturalism

Nature is “amoral.” It operates on the conservation of energy and the successful transfer of genetic material. The lion’s hunger is a biological drive that overrides any philosophical or religious standing the prey might claim.

The reason humans developed such complex moral codes while lions didn’t comes down to our niche. We aren’t the fastest or the strongest; our “superpower” is extreme cooperation.

In the eyes of evolution, “Morality” is effectively a high-tech software update that allowed humans to live in groups larger than a dozen people without killing each other over a piece of fruit.

Nature is not “good” in a human sense. If morality were baked into the fabric of the universe by a benevolent creator, you probably wouldn’t see a lion killing cubs or a cuckoo bird pushing other chicks out of a nest to starve. Instead, we see Biological Egoism: traits are passed on because they help that specific individual’s genes survive, even at a horrific cost to others.

Human morality is essentially our attempt to “hack” evolution—creating rules that force us to act against our selfish predatory instincts so we can build cities, hospitals, and libraries instead of just fighting over the same patch of savanna. Our history shows a disappointing paradox, however.

The Facade of our Morality

Humans are arguably the most successful predators in history because we can be selectively moral.

From the slaughter of the Amalekites in the Bible to modern warfare—reveals a dark “loophole” in human evolution: Tribalism.

The “In-Group” vs. “Out-Group” Loophole

The “Thou shalt not kill” rule has almost never been applied universally by any society in history. Evolutionarily, it was designed for the In-Group (your tribe, your religion, your nation).

• Inside the tribe: Killing is “murder” and is punished because it destroys the group.
• Outside the tribe: Killing is often framed as “justice,” “war,” or “survival.”

When you look at the Crusades, Slavery or the Holocaust, the perpetrators didn’t necessarily think they were breaking their moral codes. They used ideology to dehumanize the other side—effectively “reclassifying” their victims as non-humans or “prey.” Once you do that, the “Thou shalt not kill” software switches off, and the “Lion” hardware takes back over.

We are “Lions” with Better Excuses

In some ways, humans are more dangerous than lions. A lion kills a cub for a clear, immediate biological gain. Humans kill thousands of children because of abstract ideas: borders, gods, or “racial purity.” We use our high-level intelligence to justify the same predatory instincts that drive a lion, but on a much more efficient, industrial scale.

The Raw Truth about Our Evolution

From the lion killing a cub to the human building a gas chamber – it is all the result of that same lineage of “star stuff” trying to maintain its own complexity against the law of entropy.

• The Protocell’s Goal: Basic metabolism and replication.
• The Multicellular Strategy: Cooperation between cells to form an organism.
• The Social Strategy: Cooperation between organisms to form a “super-organism” (a tribe or society).

The “rules” about (laws/morality) are just a biological mechanism to keep that social “super-organism” from falling apart. If the cells in your body start acting like “lions” and consuming each other, we call it cancer, and the body dies. If the individuals in a society start acting like “lions” and killing each other, the society collapses.

The Conflict of Randomness

The reason human history is so bloody is that our evolution was random and messy, not designed for “goodness.” We have:

1. Reptilian/Old Brain instincts: Drive us toward immediate survival, food, and reproductive dominance (the “Lion” side).
2. Neocortex capabilities: Allow us to plan, imagine the future, and create abstract rules like “Human Rights.”

These two systems are constantly at war. The “random events” of our evolution didn’t result in a finished, harmonious product; they resulted in a high-intelligence primate that still carries the territorial aggression of its ancestors.

Why the “Star Stuff” Kills Itself

In a our materialist universe, there is no “evil.” for some groups or individuals There is only energy efficiency and genetic persistence.

• War is often a struggle for energy (land, oil, food).
• Genocide is often a horrific extension of kin selection (eliminating genetic competition).

We aren’t “better” than lions; we are just “lions” who have learned to use the physics of the universe (gunpowder, nuclear fission) to play out our ancient, biological competitions on a global scale.

The “Thin Veneer” of Civilization

Our morality is just a thin crust over a molten core of animalistic aggression.

• When resources are plenty and the law is strong, we are “civilized.”
• When there is fear, scarcity, or a powerful leader telling us “They are the enemy,” that crust breaks instantly.

The “evolution of morality” hasn’t stopped us from being monsters. It has just changed the scale and the justification.

In nature, a lion might kill three cubs. In human history, our “tribal morality” allows us to kill millions because we can convince ourselves that those millions don’t “count” as neighbors. We aren’t “better” than lions; we are just the only animal capable of building a legal system to protect our friends and a weapons system to vaporize our enemies.

It’s a high-stakes biological gamble. We are the first species on Earth that has evolved the intelligence to destroy itself completely. Whether the “star stuff” that makes up us survives or reverts back to dust depends on whether our cultural “cooperation software” can actually contain our “predator hardware.”