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been *scientifically* superseded.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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