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The song "Lady Venom" by Swollen Members has a line in it, basically at the very beginning,
"Murder; every small animal commits it.
The only difference is I won't admit I did it."

That made me think:
We define murder in today's society as wrong (thus our need to lie about it), I believe this is wise and just.
How long does it take our (humans) evolutionariy line of organisms to pick up certain morals, such as: murder is wrong? Or, canabalism is wrong (where in some societies it isn't wrong, so canabalism isn't defined by society, but by instinctive morals).
Lions will kill eachother over food, or mates, or territory. Why haven't they decided killing their own is wrong?
Spiders will eat other spiders, some reptiles will eat other reptiles, birds will eat other birds, wolves will even eat wolves. Yet, rats, what are concidered to be lower forms of life than wolves, will not eat themselves. Even if put in pits with hundreds of other rats, they wont eat eachother.

How do certain organisms get programmed with certain instincts, societal instincts?

I guess i'm a sociopath for thinking about murderin certain individuals.

i doubt that rats don't eat other rats, cuz i've heard about a case, when an injured man got surrounded by a lot of rats & eaten by them. i don't know much about rats, but maybe there are certain types of rats that eat meat & other types don't...

all those animals that you listed eat eachother cuz they live only with instincts & emotions. humans have intellect & are not to slose to instincts as animals. that's why we think killing is bad.

its probly a combination of the three(intellect, instinct, emotion). Theres probly at least one of these aspects at all times that hinder the impulse of humans killing each other.

imbedded in our instinctive behavior is the need to preserve oneself(very obvious). Unlike most animals, humans are lacking physically. We don't have the endurance of a gazelle, the camouflage of a stickbug, the strength of a bear, the agility of a monkey, or a bird's ability to fly. But we do have advanced brains and reasoning skills. What you need to know is that brain cells individually are weak and quite useless, but as you add more and more, the processing power increases exponentially. Humans beings are much the same way. A single person could not have hoped to survive in the very beginning of human existence, but a whole community could thrive. In order to satisfy the need to survive, we need to live with others(this includes not killing them).

I''m thinking the emotional aspect is directly related to the instinctive one. When we kill a person, i'm guessing that either immediately or sometime after, we recognize that this has probly hurt your chances for survival. This in turn leads to the reward/pleasure center of the brain being unstimulated. Because we have advanced brains, we realize the cause of the lack of stimulation.

The intellectual aspect comes from the evolution of the human race and society. Due to the above factors, people have refrained from killing each other and have become accustomed to that. When someone kills another, this is 'odd' and 'different' behavior. People tend to be disgusted 'odd' and 'different' things. That disgust is what we feel about homocide.

now, on how this applies to real-life. lets take a homocidal sociopath, intellectually and instinctively, he probably feels he has been threatened in some way, and the need to be with others overrides the need to survive. emotionally, he has no/very few emotions, therefore this factor fails to stop him. therefore he is free to murder his victim

anyhow, this is my reasoning on the subject, agree or disagree, doesn't really matter. on a side note, i don't believe in god and believe in evolution, that why i mention people and society evolved and adopted an anti-homocidal tendencies. people didnt just spring out of the ground hating to murder other people

Evolution requires two things: first, mutation. That is, each generation must have some chance to be unlike the previous. Second, natural selection. That is, the individuals in each generation who are better suited to their environment must be more likely to produce children. If these two things are present, then a species will evolve to become
better suited to its environment (you can easily prove this). Notice that "better suited to its environment" does not necessarily mean "nicer," "more intelligent," or "stronger;" it all depends on what works best in the environment. Now if we assume that the moral nature of human beings is different now than it was in the past, then evolution could have caused this difference if the two parts of evolution (mutation + natural selection) are present, that is if each generation of humans is a little different morally from the previous, and if more (or less) moral humans are more likely to produce children.

The theory of evolution explains how humans (and other organisms) came to have the biology that we do---walking upright, big brains, etc. The Theory of evolution does not necessarily explain why human beings today behave the way we do. For example, all humans are one species, but we speak many different languages. That we can have language at all is due to our biology (our brain and vocal cords), and thus due to
evolution. The differences in the languages we do speak (Spanish, English, Russian, etc) are due to something else---differences in culture.

So I would say that morality is not really a "biological" trait. Just like with languages, what is moral in one culture is not moral in another. Also, what was moral 400 years ago is no longer moral today. Evolution only happens over much longer periods of time (tens of thousands to millions of years), so it can't be responsible for morality. Morality is just something that we humans have invented on our own, just like we invented Spanish, English, and Russian.