Re: [Marxism] Bonds, Genes, Racism

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 23:41:46 -0400 "Sayan Bhattacharyya"
<ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> On 8/11/07, Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Wilson proudly says of
> > himself, "At my core, I am a social conservative, a loyalist. I 
> cherish
> > traditional institutions, the more venerable and ritual-laden the 
> better."
> 
> Louis,
> 
> As you surely know, John Maynard Smith, the British biologist who
> applied game theory to evolution and is prominently listed as a
> sociobiologist in Wikipedia's Sociobiology page, was a Marxist.

Up through the early 1950s perhaps, but not after that.
He had started becoming disillusioned with the CPGB
because of the Party's support for the Stalinist position
on Lysenkoism, and eventually left the Party following
the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/contentViewArticle.asp?article=1738
http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/168/3/1105#BIB20

> 
> As in questions of science, the important point is whether the
> scholarship is good or flawed. So, criticism must be directed at the
> science itself, not at the political views of the practitioners of 
> the
> science. Gould, Lowentin, etc. have done the former. Regrettably,
> Rosenthal's article is a string of instances of the latter.
> 
I agree that Rosenthal's rant was rather atrocious, given
that there is so many good critiques of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology from people like Gould and Lewontin



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