[Marxism] human origins

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox

All species are fairly stable for long periods of geological time. See
Gould, Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Minor variations occur, but
that is all. Name a species -- and you will find that no substantial
change has occurred in it since its early appearance: i.e., its fossil
record will pretty much duplicate its present. Nothing teleological
about it.

If you read texts on human revolution you will soon run into repeated
references to "biologically modern humans," and they/we became
established as a species about 100,000 b.p., give or take a few tens of
thousands. Something happened 40 to 50 thousand years ago, and change
became much more rapid. For example, neanderthals & h. sapiens had
shared the world for over 50,000 years or so -- but suddenly
neanderthals disappeared in a geological micro-second. Various
speculations. no certain knowledge. One thing is quite certain: that
change resulted from culture, not a biological change in the species.
(But see Ian Tattersall, _The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the
Science of What Makes Us Human_.)

Repeat: Most species, very nearly all of multi-cellular species, remain
biologically stable, with no significant change, during their whole
existence. See the passages in Gould's work that argue "absence is
data."
Carrol

^^^^^^
CB: This is true of social revolution too. Most of the time we are socially
"stable" in the sense that we are equilibrated in a mode of production. Only
rarely in history are there the social revolutions that Marx refers to in
_The Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_
or whatever. Most of the time, the base is not causing the superstructure to
change. Most of the time in history the superstructure is determining much
of life.

By the way, the sudden disappearance of the Neanderthals is typical too.
That's how Darwinian speciation works. Other species in a close niche go
extinct. The most recent evidence is that Neanderthals were a different
species than homo sapiens ( used to be thought we could intermate with
Neanderthals, i.e. that we were same species). Most species go extinct in a
geological micro-second.

Speciation is quick or rare in the fossil record, contra Darwin who
emphasized gradulness.  Darwin couldn't understand the "gaps" or "leaps" in
the fossil record, the "punctuations". This was the lack of dialectics in
Darwin ( Marx and Engels referred to it as his "crude English style"). Lenin
predicted that evolution as espoused by Darwin would be modified by
something like punctuated equilibrium. And lo and behold...



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