Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I have seen a number of people who espouse what they call "evolutionary ethics" argue as follows: "Our ethical standards are a product of our evolutionary history, meaning there are no objective standards of right and wrong, only what one group or another has happened to evolve." Imagine applying this to, say, mathematics: "Our mathematical standards are a product of our evolutionary history, meaning there are no objective standards of true and false in math, only what one group or another has happened to evolve. If some other culture happens to think that there are integers n greater than two for which a n + b n = c n , well, that is just their standard! And when you say that I solved that differential equation wrongly, well, that is only a prediction that the particular mathematicians in our culture with our mathematical standards will disapprove of what you did." But even worse for these folks: our thought about evolution has evolved as well. An...

"In Hume's time a philosopher who denied the innateness of moral sentiments, and held that they must have a natural history, had only the limits of the individual life within which to trace this history. These limits did not give room enough for even a plausible derivation of moral interests from animal wants. It is otherwise when the history may be supposed to range over an indefinite number of generations. The doctrine of hereditary transmission, it is held, explains to us how susceptibilities of pleasure and pain, of desire and aversion, of hope and fear, may be handed down with gradually accumulated modifications which in time attain the full measure of the difference between the moral man and the greater ape... "...the theory of descent and evolution opens up a vista of possibilities beyond the facts, so far ascertained, of human history... Such enquiry, it is thought, will in time give us the means of reducing the moral susceptibilities of man to the rank of ordi...