[Marxism] The Wars Over Evolution

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Volume 52, Number 16 . October 20, 2005


Review
The Wars Over Evolution
By Richard C. Lewontin
The

The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions,
both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explana-tion.

^^^
CB: Ain't it the truth. Two opposite reactions: idealism and biological
reductionism.

^^^^


 One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a
fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as
the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the
material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold
such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools.

The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human
society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening
its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to account
not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The
Evolution-Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By
Genes Alone with the second.



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This may seem odd, since the process of natural selection is supposed to
make organisms more fit for their environment. So why does evolution not
result in a general increase of the fitness of life to the external world?
Wouldn't that be progress? The reason that there is no general progress is
that the environments in which particular species live are themselves
changing

^^^^^
CB: This is relativity of natural selection fitness.

^^^^


 and, relative to the organisms, are usually getting worse. So most of
natural selection is concerned with keeping up. Certainly quite new kinds of
making a living have been occasionally exploited in evolution, but every
species eventually becomes extinct (99.9 percent already have) and no way of
making a living will be around forever.[4]
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363#fn4>  Judging from the fossil record
a typical mammalian species lasts roughly ten million years, so we might
expect to last another nine million unless, as a consequence of our immense
ability to manipulate the physical world, we either extinguish ourselves a
good deal sooner or invent some extraordinary way to significantly postpone
the inevitable.

Clip-

That was no guarantee that his model for evolution would have to be entirely
correct because it might have turned out that there was significant
inheritance of acquired characters.


^^^^
CB: Now he's at it. Culture is LaMarckian ( not Darwinian). Culture allows
inheritance of acquired characters, inheritance of extrasomatic ,i.e.
non-bodily, acquired ( by experience) charaters

Inhertitance through cultural transmission, not genetically, but
nonetheless, humans biological "bodies" include their cultures.


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