Regarding your post 152, I am as perplexed by your choice of quotations as I am by betty's.
The ham-fisted propositions that you and betty are attempting to support with your selected quotes have been stated by betty as:
"The 'problematic' affinity of Marxian and Darwinian thought;" and"The pronouncements of the Dawkins and Lewontins etc., etc., of this world [are] an attempt at social renovation quite along Marxian lines. They wish to obliterate Western culture and eradicate historical memory."
As for the second proposition blockquoted above, you expand upon it in your post by saying that it "is in reference to science and Western culture per se - not a particular scientific theory," by which I suppose you mean that not only evolutionary biology but indeed all of science is in Marxist cahoots to obliterate western culture and eradicate historical memory.
Such extraordinary (if exceedingly vague) propositions would normally be supported by extraordinary evidence, but I cannot see any connection at all between the evidence supplied by you and betty and the propositions at hand.
betty chose for support a 1951 Saturday Evening Post essay by Loren Eiseley, an essay that had nothing to do with Marx or any "'problematic' affinity of Marxian and Darwinian thought." (I pointed this out in detail in post 144, but as far as I can tell, betty took umbrage at the first paragraph and read no further.)
You have supplied as evidentiary support a (corrected) quote from a book review by Lewontin, and a pair of letters to the editor by Lewontin and Perutz.
As for the first of your selected quotes (and in response to my admittedly irritable complaint that you selectively edited its content) you say -- "It is hardly "quote-mining" to raise the comments of a self-confessed Marxist on the subject of materialism and science from an article entitled The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism."
It is hardly relevant either. First, that article you refer to (The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism) was authored by Philip Johnson. It is obviously not the source of the quote. The quote itself came from a review by Lewontin of a book by Carl Sagan.
Second, Lewontin was commenting on the often counter-intuitive nature of scientific claims as an impediment to popular acceptance. It is in that context (the very context you excluded in your first iteration of the quote) that he says:
"It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen."
While I (and many others, to say the least) disagree with Lewontin's often derogatory dismissal of religious faith, it is nevertheless necessary to scientific inquiry that untestable and non-observable supernaturalism be excluded.
This is a rather unremarkable observation, and I am mystified by your attempts to read into it a Marxist über-conspiracy to obliterate Western culture and eradicate historical memory. Are you contending that materialist methodologies are uniquely Marxist, and but for Marxism, scientists in the west would be using Ouija Boards in the lab? Or perhaps you are contending something so pointlessly reductionist as "all atheists are commies"? Just what particular aspect of western culture and historical memory is under Marxist attack here?
The second set of quotes that you select as alleged evidence supporting the propositions at hand is perhaps more mystifying.
In this exchange of letters by Lewontin and Perutz, the point under discussion is whether Darwin's ideas were a product and reflection of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism.
Lewontin's point is that, while historians who employ a purely Marxist lens have traditionally held that Darwin's ideas have their basis in 19th century capitalism, one need not adhere to Marxist historiography to reach this conclusion.
In response, Perutz argues that Darwin's ideas were independent of capitalist economic theory.
"Darwin's fourth chapter, headed "Natural Selection," is the crucial one that contains the essence of Darwin's theory. Its first section is on "Natural Selection—Its Power Compared with Man's Selection." Again, in a letter to Alfred R. Wallace, written on May 1, 1857, Darwin remarked: "We [he and Wallace] differ only, that I was led to my views from what artificial selection has done for domestic animals." It was the stock breeder rather than the entrepreneur who served Darwin as a model."(Emphasis original.)
Neither Lewontin nor Perutz even remotely suggest that Darwin and Marx cross-pollinated, or that there exists a "'problematic' affinity of Marxian and Darwinian thought." Indeed, quite the opposite. Theirs is a discussion of the alleged capitalist influence on Darwin's theory.
Perhaps you are contending in some round-about way that, although Marx's ideas pre-dated Darwin's, but for the goad of Darwin's capitalist theory, Marxism would not have subsequently flourished as a reactionary movement, and therefore evolutionary biologists (or perhaps scientists of all stripes) should now just shut up lest reactionary Marxists "obliterate western culture and eradicate historical memory." I don't think this is what you had in mind, but I'm at a loss for any other explanation.
You deployed these quotes for some purpose or another, and betty was positively ecstatic at their content, so perhaps you can provide an atypically clear explanation of their relevance -- other than, of course, their simple deployment as a "smelly smokescreen."
It is “received doctrine” (Lewontin’s term, not mine) among the historians of science that Darwin’s theory was primarily fueled by brutal 19th century capitalism (the point Lewontin, a Marxist, was making.)
The rebuttal by Perutz was that Darwin didn’t have much experience at all with said capitalism and even so, that altruism and cooperation figured in survival as well as brutality. Perutz used a quote right from Darwin to figuratively smack Lewontin across the head and underscore the point I am making here more generally, i.e. that conviction in a doctrine does not truth make:
As you correctly perceived was a main point, the first is that Darwin’s theory is the scientific (read, authoritative to materialists) denigration of capitalism as base or crude animal behavior. Quoting Lewontin:
The third and most insidious point is that historic materialism (or revising history with a materialist template that throws away all insights not materialistic) - is the root of Socialism, i.e natural philosophy vis-a-vis the evolution of society.
According to Marx, historical materialism is the economic system of any people that determines its social structure, the latter, determining its political and religious structures. The fundamental cause of any social evolution, and consequently of any social advance, being the struggle man wages against Nature for his own existence. Marx’s fundamental idea can be summed up as follows: 1) the production relations determine all other relations existing among people in their social life. 2) The production relations are determined by the state of the productive forces.
The basic principle of the materialist explanation of history is that men’s thinking is conditioned by their being, or that in the historical process, the course of the development of ideas is determined by the course of development of economic relationships. So, historical materialism claims to be a way of explaining history. It deals with the causes of social evolution, stressing that history is governed by necessary laws that are as immutable as laws of nature.
Historical materialism is considered a scientific method by which to comprehend the events of the past and to grasp their true nature...
Marxism required that legitimacy. In that respect, Darwin’s theory supported Marxism and thus it was embraced both ways - socialism as an improvement over capitalism - and also elevating historic materialism to "science."
Documents showing the gradual Marxist exploitation of Darwin:
I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the ‘Malthusian’ theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only — with its geometric progression — to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1875
Engels to Pyotr Lavrov In London
Abstract
Written: Nov. 12-17, 1875;
Transcription/Markup: Brian Basgen;
Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.
London, Nov. 12-17, 1875
1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin’s method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin’s time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Búchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrowminded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature – inanimate as well as animate – includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meager phrase “struggle for existence,” a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis, such a procedure really contains its own condemnation. [...]
3) I do not deny the advantages of your method of attack, which I would like to call psychological; but I would have chosen another method. Everyone of us is influenced more or less by the intellectual environment in which he mostly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I, and for a propaganda journal that appeals to the “restraining effect", [a quote from Lavrov’s article] the moral sense, your method is probably the better one. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and still does so much damage, it would not fit; it would be misunderstood, sentimentality perverted. In our country it is hatred rather than love that is needed – at least in the immediate future – and more than anything else a shedding of the last remnants of German idealism, an establishment of the material facts in their historical rights. I should therefore attack – and perhaps will when the time comes – these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:
The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’s theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.
4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies. It makes it possible, as you properly remark:
Apropos. Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the “struggle for existence.” I would therefore never do this favor to these false naturalists.
5) For the same reason I would have changed accordingly the formulation of the following proposition of yours, which is essentially quite correct:
In their ignorance and neglect of the study of social problems, the present day representatives of Darwinism follow, almost without exception, the example of their lord and master. But the colossal work which Darwin accomplished offers an. excuse for him which, however, cannot be extended to his followers. Moreover, the social movement and social problems have, since Darwin’s death, attained an importance and extent which no one in his time could have conceived possible, and, on the part of the Socialists, the question of the significance which Darwinism has for social evolution has been so repeatedly discussed that the exponents of Darwinism have ex cathedra every reason to concern themselves a little with political economy.
The reader is reminded of Darwin’s ignorance of economic phenomena by the reproduction of the letter sent by Darwin to Marx wherein he thanks the latter for the gift of his book, “Das Kapital,” and among other things says: “I heartily wish that I possessed a greater knowledge of the deep and important subject of economic questions which would make me a more worthy recipient of your gift.”
Darwin here admits in plain language his ignorance of economic questions, but he never allowed himself to pass judgment upon Socialism. It is quite otherwise with his successors, especially with Ernst Haeckel, who became enlightened on the antagonism between Darwinism and Socialism before he had ever read a socialistic writing. An amusing instance of this is quoted by Woltmann in a note to the book. He says that when in the spring of 1894 he as a young student visited Haeckel in order to consult him upon some question bearing upon Darwinism and Socialism, he discovered that Haeckel had no real conception of the economic and historic doctrines of Socialism, and up to the summer of 1893 had only read my book, “Die Frau und Der Sozialismus,” and this probably but little, as I had sharply attacked him in it. That he stands no better than other representatives of Darwinism is manifold.
If, as Woltmann says, “Socialism must be brought into closer relationship with the teaching of natural evolution than has hitherto been the case,” the fault of this cannot be laid against the Socialists, who have not failed to understand it, but is due to the exponents of Darwinism, for whom, as the author amply proves, the warning is very necessary.
Woltmann further on says: “In order to comprehend the progress in human culture, considerations, other than economic, must be taken into account, and these can be furnished by physiology and general biology, e.g., the comprehension of the laws of differentiation, adaptation, and transmission, and at least a special study is necessary to find: whether natural selection has exerted its influence in the individual and class struggle, why it has been inoperative, and what may have taken its place. These questions have not been considered by Marx and Engels.” This, however, is not quite so; for in the “Anti-Dühring” Engels has fully discussed the connection between the results of natural philosophy and the laws of the evolution of society, and Woltmann himself devotes a large space in his book to this work which gives an answer to his statement. The position according to Engels is that the sphere of labour becomes within society an arena of combat of ever-increasing dimensions: “It is the Darwinian struggle for individual existence in which nature, with potential wrath, envelopes society. The natural standpoint of the animal appears as the summit of human society.”
In human society the individual holds a dual position which no other creature, ever so highly developed, can possess. Man is, at once an individual and a social being. As the latter, he is again a member of a class with separate and special interests, which are more or less opposed to the interests of other classes, and influence the situation and development of separate persons in a higher degree than their personal nature. This distinguishes man from the other animals and makes it impossible to consider him in his evolution from the same point of view as them.
The work of Woltmann brings out another thought. Independent of Darwinism, one can comprehend the evolutionary laws of society in their various degrees of development, but the Darwinian, as such, can never understand the evolutionary laws of human society, if he does not understand scientific Socialism, and with it its basis – historic materialism. Without this one remains in the rough, purely mechanical conception of Darwinism, which still dominates the majority of the exponents of Darwin’s theories. Woltmann is of opinion that the logical help which modern Socialism has received from Hegelian philosophy is not sufficient, and that Socialism would obtain greater scientific power if it returned, so far as its abstract propositions are concerned, to the philosophy of Kant.
atlaw: by which I suppose you mean that not only evolutionary biology but indeed all of science is in Marxist cahoots to obliterate western culture and eradicate historical memory
Irish...Your very long exposition can be boiled down to the above complaint, that complaint being that you don’t want to believe that evolution is tied in any way to Marxism and variants. Marxism offends you, as it ought.
Just the thought of evolution and Marxism united causes you and the other evolutionists on this board to experience cognitive dissonance.
However, it is certainly true that evolution is the creation story for Marxism, Nazism, socialism, Secular Humanism, Post Modernism, modern liberalism (socialism), Progressivism (socialism), and Cosmic Humanism (New Age, Gaia, etc).
Your understanding of evolution is rather shallow. You can regurgitate theories, names, etc. but know nothing of its most foundational philosophical presuppositions and their historic antecedents. History awaits you atlaw. Go forth and research; discover for yourself the truth.