OK, I'll take it on faith, tho none of what you do present comes close to
your assertion.
That the society in which it appeared provided a ground for Darwin's
theoretical work--less important, one would think, than his observations on
the Beagle--is hardloy surprising. Darwin's ability to see what he did and
draw the conclusions he did probably had more to do with the fad in that
same society for extravagant cattle breeding programs--the human selection
of traits to be carried forward. Otherwise, one would expect that there
would have been more than two people coming up with the idea of natural
selection (Wallace was the other). And of course the work follows from
Lyall's work in geology.
Mark
At 12:28 PM 8/21/2005, you wrote:
>On 8/21/05, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Who are these left-wing critics? Do they have names?
>
>Here is Kenan Malik, on Sokal and (amongst other things) Darwinism:
>
>http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/sokal.html
>
>"In recent years much fine historical research has revealed the extent
>to which the social and political ethos of the Victorian era is
>reflected in the work of Charles Darwin. We now know, for instance,
>that Darwin's reading of Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population - with
>its vision of a competitive struggle for limited food stocks - was
>crucial in helping him develop the idea of natural selection as a
>mechanism for evolution. It is plausible to infer from this that the
>social conditions and intellectual climate of Victorian England
>provided the substrate in which modern evolutionary theory could
>develop. But however much ideology helped shape Darwinian theory, we
>also have to acknowledge that it provides the most objective account
>of the biological history of the Earth. Darwinism might have been
>ideologically inspired, but it also happens to be true."
>
>He needs to argue that "Darwinism...also happens to be true"
>specifically in order to counter the argument that Darwinism, being
>"ideologically inspired", is a kind of instrument of ideology, and
>hence challengable on ideological grounds.
>
>Going back to the second most recent thing I read on the subject, John
>Milbank bases a vitalist objection to Darwinism on precisely the claim
>that the modern Darwinian synthesis (epitomised by Richard Dawkins) is
>framed by an outmoded "Newtonion-Malthusian"
>epistemological/ideological constellation, and that it is
>ideologically conservative to the extent that this constellation has
>been *scientifically* superseded. (See
>http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cotp/JohnMilbank1.doc for the paper, which
>goes on to talk rather too much about Bergson for my liking).
>
>I forget the name of the person I read a while ago who was seriously
>proposing that this ideological conservatism was a symptom of
>evolutionary theory's thralldom to the imperatives of late capitalism,
>so will have to ask you to take my word for it that he was a) a person
>of the left, and b) not a figment of my imagination.
>
>Lysenkoism is the most obvious historical example of an ostensibly
>left-wing political ideology finding Darwinism objectionable, and
>wanting to replace it with something more congenial to its view of
>history.
>
>Dominic
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