Re: [Marxism] The transition to capitalism: is it in our genes?

["Auguste Blanqui" <blanquist@xxxxxxxxx>]

Uh, the Wade-Clark piece reads: "Dr. Clark's view is that institutions
and incentives have been much the same all along and explain very
little, which is why there is so little agreement on the causes of the
Industrial Revolution."  And: "Dr. Clark says the middle-class values
needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally
or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward
evolution as the explanation. "Through the long agrarian passage
leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically
more adapted to the modern economic world," he writes. And, "The
triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our
genes as in ideology or rationality.""  The article largely discounts
institutional/social-ecological change.

And what genes (fully or partially) have explained any behavior, hmm?
I agree we shouldn't reject things a priori.  But we shouldn't give
credence to things that don't have any supporting evidence, which is
why magic and genetic coding for "industriousness" (whatever that
means) shouldn't be viable hypotheses.

On 8/7/07, Sayan Bhattacharyya <ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 8/7/07, Auguste Blanqui <blanquist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > That article's just Social Darwinism with a modern gloss.  There's
> > nothing in it that says x genetic trait translates into y behavior.
> > And genetic reductionism has a bad track record, the most prominent
> > recent examples being the so-called "gay gene" from years back and the
> > breast cancer genes (some who have them don't have breast cancer, and
> > a lot who have breast cancer don't have the genes.)
>
> We all know that genetic _reductionism_ is misguided. But nowhere is
> the NY TImes article claiming that there is _a_ "single" gene that
> codes for "capitalist behavior". It could be that a network of genes,
> under certain sets of interaction with the environment, favor the
> expression of certain traits, including psychological/behavioral ones.
> There is nothing inherently implausible about this theory at all.
>
> To say that something may have a genetic component is not the same as
> saying that it is due exclusively to a gene. The latter would have
> been reductionism.
>
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