10.29.07
There is no Darwinian left
Marxism, Darwin, and Jerry Fodor’s Flying Pigs
I will comment later on this one, but it is downright sad that the left is so stuck on Darwinism. Dialectics of natural selection? C’mon. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature? I will be polite.
Actually, if you want dialectics, why not an Hegelian account of NS? Or a natural selection of leftisms.
It’s time for the left to simply drop Darwin and pick up where Marx left off: this theory is the prime ideology of the bourgeoisie.
The ruling ideas of the epoch are those of the bourgeoisie…and they have apparently ruled Marxists to boot.
This article will look at his arguments as presented in “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” from the 18 October 2007 issue of The London Review of Books. I will try to establish that his arguments against natural selection are not convincing and are based a mechanical interpretation of Darwin that is a characteristic of contemporary Western thought. That when Darwin is read dialectically, as he was by Marx and Engels (cf. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature) the objections to natural selection as the main motor of evolutionary change evaporate.
Stephen P. Smith said,
October 29, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Hegel’s account of life in the “Science of Logic” can only be regarded as pan-vitalistic.