The human Conscience and the Soul.

Indeed. Conscience could just be a fettling of the instinct to nurture offspring to nurturing the group.

Yes!

Arguably, removing the death penalty has an effect on selection and maybe changes the balance between criminal and non criminal personality types

I think of it as the unconscious being the car and the conscious being the driver .
The driver is only a small part of the process but acts as if they are the process .

I have studied psychology in the past. But also believe in a soul.

In terms of psychology, conscience is what they refer to as a super ego. It is something we have evolved to aid us in working together as a cooperative species, a pack animal. We learn what is right and wrong and by a mixture of evolutionary predispositions and being told what is right and wrong we internalise a set of rules to live by, a moral code. If we then offend against that code, we feel guilt which we experience as an unpleasant emotion. No one enjoys feeling guilt and most of us would prefer to avoid feeling guilty. If however we do good in a way that conforms to our inner moral code, we feel an enhanced sense of self worth, perhaps even a little pride. And overall this feels good. We experience it as a pleasant feeling. These positive feelings based upon adhering to a moral code are also encouraged by emotions such as empathy for others, and a general predisposition to give a shit about each other.

Sociopaths are very much aberrations in that they have no moral code, no feelings of guilt, no empathy at all, no internalised conscience. They lack a super ego, a conscience, but they are not how we are meant to be.

When it comes to a soul, I believe life is where the spiritual and material realms intersect, and the soul is the spiritual aspect of us. I believe that spirit and matter interconnect most profoundly in our conscience, our super ego. That a sociopath appears to have no conscience, ie super ego, is highly suggestive to me of a disconnect between soul and body. Somehow the soul is missing. A sociopath might be quite literally soulless. But of course when we come to such matters we are discussing matters of faith which cannot perhaps yet be proven one way or the other. Why a living biological entity should be soulless is something of an enigma. I am still grasping at inner truths without knowing all the answers.

We have a number of attributes that make us what we are. Altruism and compassion as a default setting so that the fact that we tend to care for and support each other is a big part of our success.

So too is our intelligence, our ability to imagine things in our heads about how to react to certain situations for positive outcomes. And our ability to communicate ideas and process the ideas of others, for which speech itself is an incredible evolutionary tool. Learning to think in the abstract, and to talk, are by far our greatest evolutionary assets. We have also learned to understand each other to an incredible extent, able to plot and plan based on how others are likely to think and respond in certain situations. Like the guy who has an interest in the same female we fancy. We are able to imagine how he might think in certain situations, informed by any knowledge we might have about his character, and his emotional and intellectual state, and formulate strategies that might appeal to the desired female and minimise the appeal of our rival. Knowing that he will be doing the same in a battle of wits And we also have to figure out how she as another thinking being like us might respond or react to certain situations. We can use our imaginations to test run certain plans or ways of proceeding, itself informed by past experience for which we draw on our memories.

We are all highly adept and intelligent social animals, able to understand what others might think and feel in certain situations, and develop plans based on that knowledge. We broadly know what sort of thing is likely to make someone feel angry, or amused, or sad, or sympathetic. We can envisage the emotional states of others. So not just intellectually, but emotionally and socially  we are a highly advanced and evolved species, able to understand and manipulate each others' thinking, emotions, thought processes and social interactions. As emotionally, socially, and intellectually advanced beings, our ability to understand how each other thinks and plan accordingly is really quite incredible when we think about it

There are two types of thought - Fast thinking (dubbed System 1 by Kahneman) is unconscious, instinctive. Fast thinking results in snap judgments. Slow thinking (System 2) is what most of us would consider actual thought: it’s conscious, deliberative, and mostly rational.

They take place in different parts of the brain. When you learn to play a musical instrument you start off by using System 2 and you play slowly and think about everything you do - but it is slow. When you've learnt to play the process has moved to a different part of the brain and you no longer consciously think about it and it's much faster - and more accurate.

If watch a tennis player playing brilliantly until he gets match point and the "choking" as they call it, what's happened is that he was playing using system 2 until he got to match point - at which point he begins to play carefully (thinking about shots). In other words he's reverted to system 1 - which is what he used as a beginner.