Re: [OPE-L] Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What? By LOUIS UCHITELLE

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [OPE-L] Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What? By

> >
> Hi Rakesh, I agree with you
> totally.  Not In Our Genes, in my view,  is a
> book quite important and essential for any Marxian scholar. What is
> your dissertation about?

It was a critique of the Bell Curve, though I tried to show to what extent many of its critics

shared in some of its dubious assumptions and to what extent its gloomy ideology was the way (as

Mattick suggested) in which bourgeois society comes to some self understanding of its actual (non harmonic) nature.

> Have you papers (from you) on the
> relationship between social sciences and "natural"
> sciences?

Yes I sent you offlist my paper on Darwin; I argue that the formative influence of Malthus'

population  dynamics on Darwin's theory has been exaggerated.

I am a bit skeptical of Dickens' important argument that class inequality is manifesting itself in and reproducing itself through biological inequality. I think here of Jerome Kagan's skepticism about the determining importance of prenatal and perinatal experience.

By the way, people will probably be interested in Margaret Schabas' Natural Origins of Economics.

I haven't read it yet, but it seems to be part of the attempt to embed economics in the natural

world. Isn't this what Paul Seabright is trying to do as well?

Yours truly, Rakesh

> Yours
> Alejandro
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