Some evidence that morality comes, not from religious training, but from our evolutionary wiring:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
…
Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not “handed down” by philosophers and clergy, but “handed up,” an outgrowth of the brain’s basic propensities.

It shouldn’t be surprising to find an evolutionary basis for altruism; critters that can work together will naturally have some advantage over those that have to plug along by themselves.

I’ve blogged before about the connection between mirror neurons, language, and morality, but it seems that this evolutionary wiring must go back farther than that.

No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe’s head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

A good article, but why did they have to include this?

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Assisi, schmassisi. I can hear the blather already: ‘Science is only now just beginning to recognise what spiritual leaders have been teaching for centuries.’ When in fact the discovery is one more sign of religion’s irrelevance.