[jraines]

Reading philosophy is still good mental exercise, and it gives you interesting ways to think about the world. Learning to call bullshit on intimidating ideas is a good thing to learn.

I agree that one test of it is whether it changes the way you do things -- or at least gives you an imperative to do so that you're too weak or cowardly to heed (see Nietzche, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Seneca).

But I dunno -- the whole math versus the world mentality always strikes me as a symptom of too much craving for certainty. Math never told us anything about the rights of man.

[bluishgreen]

I dunno about math. But conclusively telling people in clear terms that we were all monkeys once asserts equality of humankind in a brutally ironic way.

[euccastro]

Does it? Gorillas were all monkeys too, and they are not equal to us[1].

I agree thinking about evolution can give you an insight on human rights. It's interesting to reason about how moral rules emerge from certain social traits, and why have such traits proven evolutionarily stable.

[1] I don't mean humans intrinsically 'deserve' 'rights' that other living beings don't.

[bluishgreen]

Historically one of the tools that was used to keep racism on the move was stories about ancistry.eg.Africans were told that they have no history, that all the ancient historic structures that they saw were built by a lost white race that lived there. Similar stories can be found in all cultures propagating racism, Inside Hinduism they had stories which claimed some people descending from the gods while the others just happened to be standing around.

This is what was broken quiet unintentionally by Darwin,

[euccastro]

I can't see how Darwin's theses refute that history about the African white aboriginals, unless that "they have no history" is supposed to mean that their ancestors didn't exist anywhere (?).

Did Hinduism revise their creational myths, or was the whole creed discredited as a result of Darwin?

For all I know, which is not much in this topic, Darwin may have helped debunk racist stories. OTOH, Darwinism offers new pretexts for racism. Didn't Nazis abuse a good deal of Darwin (along with Nietzsche) to cook their ideologies?