Dammit, you made me go look it up after all.
Here's a serious leftist (and serious biologist, too) advancing the
criticism that Darwinian evolution is a transliteration into the realm
of biology of a capitalist model of competitive struggle:
"[E]volution by natural selection bears an uncanny resemblance to the
political economy theory of early capitalism . . . What Darwin did was
take early nineteenth century political economy and expand it to
include all of natural economy." - Richard Lewontin, author of
_Biology as Ideology_
Probably the greatest single blunder of my undergraduate career was
advancing the claim, in an essay on Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, that the
work was a response to two traumas: the death of Arthur Hallam, and
the challenge to the Victorian belief in divine providence epitomised
by Darwin's theories.
I managed to save the tiniest amount of face in front of my tutor (who
placidly invited me to consider the respective publication dates of
_In Memoriam_ and _The Origin of Species_) by suggesting that the
intellectual climate prior to Darwin must have included a few notions
bearing in a similar direction.
Yes, indeed: Lyall's work in geology for starters, which I might have
known about if I'd read anything other than the primary text (my m.o.
at the time was to read whatever the set text was, ignore all the
critics and secondary sources, and proceed by guesswork in the hope of
saying something incisive by accident. It worked more often than you'd
expect. Later on I extended this technique to include dropping in
frequent quotations from whatever bits of Derrida I'd been reading
most recently).
He sent me packing to go and read Gillian Beer's _Darwin's Plots_, and
a very enlightening read it was too.
Dominic
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